The core component of any larger group of people is teams working together. This might be the usual suspects like service and product or sales & customer success or just any other team which interacts on a regular basis. Inspired by Spotifys Squad Health Check model I was looking for a tool to quickly understand the health of two teams working together and did not find any. Hence I drafted our own.
What does it do? The “Working together health check for teams” is a format consisting of two parts: a) a quick questionnaire and b) a joint moderated session based on the outcome of the questionnaire.
The questionnaire
Basis for the joint discussion between the teams is an anonymous questionnaire to get the potential challenges on the table for the discussion. The questionnaire is split up in four parts as per the follwing:
I. I am from team
Hey there – this form is there to quickly understand how well we’re working as teams within the company. The questionnaire is anonymous so please feel free to comment anything what is relevant.
Please fill the questionnaire out rather quick with a bit of gut feeling involved and please do not sync with colleagues on your reply – we want YOUR reply.
To get things started we quickly need to understand in which team you are 🙂
- I am from team __
- I am working with team ___
II. Working together with the other team
Let’s kick the health check up with a quick 1-10 assessment – feel free to add some comments on the very bottom for any topic.
- The quality of the input/support I receive from the other team is good (1-10 scale)
- The speed of me receiving feedback from the other team is good (1-10 scale)
- The communication of the other team is clear and understandable (1-10 scale)
- I can rely on the other team (1-10 scale)
- Working together with the other team is fun (1-10 scale)
- The other team supports me in difficult situations (1-10 scale)
- The other team is successful (1-10 scale)
- Any comments you have on the responses above? (optional, text)
III. What are the others actually doing?
As we’re talking about working with each other – are we aware of what our and their missions are?
- What is the mission of the team you are working in? (text)
- What is the mission of the other team? (text)
IV. Storytime – How is it working together?
Before we close it we want to hear your stories – how is it working together?
- Tell us about your BEST experience working with the other team? We want to hear the story <3
- Tell us about the WORST experience working with the other team? We also want to hear that story #transparency
- If there is one thing I would change on my team it would be
- If there is one thing I would change on the other team it would be
- Anything else we should consider – feel free to add
The session
Once the two teams have completed the anonymous questionnaire a (neutral) moderator can easily go through the results and filter the biggest exceptions. These would then easily become the discussion points for the session which would look as the following:
- Outcome of questionnaire – biggest findings
- Open discussion on top 3 findings from the questionnaire
- Action points to jointly address in the upcoming time
Wrapup & closing thoughs
Maybe this model can be also help you to help surface challenges on the interaction with teams and collect the feedback in an actionable way. I will keep this post updated with learnings and experience shares from this.