Team health

Team health is the measurable degree to which a team can do its best work over time — distinct from short-term productivity, output, or velocity. Healthy teams typically score well across roughly ten dimensions: psychological safety, clarity of purpose, role clarity, communication quality, trust, autonomy, collaboration, learning culture, well-being, and accountability. Google's Project Aristotle (2012–2015) found that psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of team effectiveness, outweighing individual talent or skill mix. Spotify, Atlassian, and McKinsey have all published variants of team-health surveys built on similar dimension frameworks.

Measuring team health usually means recurring anonymous pulse surveys (weekly or monthly) scored 1–5 per dimension, with trend analysis surfacing decline before it becomes attrition. The point is not the absolute score but the direction of change and the conversations the data triggers.