3. Workspace Health (8 Article)

If you use Workspace Pulse Check surveys, Echometer will automatically generate individual surveys for each team to cover the outstanding questions. See details: Understanding Workspace Health Rotation

As a team admin, you can see your team’s pulse check surveys in the “Surveys” tab of your team:

Workspace pulse check surveys are open by default for 2 weeks after they are created and then close automatically. As a team admin, however, you can also close the surveys manually before the 2 weeks have expired. Of course, you should only do this in consultation with your team.

The results can only be viewed when a survey is closed.

Even while the survey is still open, you can link the survey to your upcoming retrospective. To do this, open the survey and click “Use results in retro”:

Attention:

• For a survey to be linked to a retro, your current retrospective in the team must be in the “In Preparation” status and there must not already be another survey linked to the retrospective.

• If the current retrospective in the team is still running, end it. The next retrospective will then automatically be created in the “In Preparation” status.

You can see whether the survey has been successfully linked to the retrospective by the yellow box with the reference to the linked survey in the retro preparation:

In addition to the results of the survey, you can also flexibly add further health check items or other open questions to the retrospective board. Although these are then not part of the survey, they can simply be answered within the retrospective.

In this video, you will learn how to set up the Pulse Check at workspace level in Echometer and what you should pay attention to:

Play

Here is a short summary:

What is the Pulse Check for?

With the Workspace Pulse Check you can …

• Get feedback from selected teams
• In a custom interval per item
• Even if the teams don’t do retrospectives

How does it work?

The Workspace Pulse Check …

• Checks if pulse check items have been covered by the teams in the set interval already
• Creates a custom pulse check survey for every team including just the items that have not been covered yet
• Sends the survey to team members automatically (email invitation)
• Closes each Pulse Check survey after 14 days and adds the results to both the team and workspace dashboards

How do you set it up?

• Select your items and set their interval
• Include/exclude teams from the Workspace Health rotation
• (only then) Activate the pulse check for the workspace

Here are a few tips on how to set up a health check at workspace level.

1. Get stakeholders involved: A health check that goes beyond several teams is interesting for many groups of people. Therefore, you should inform in good time if you plan to set up the workspace health check. Typical stakeholders are: teams, executives, possibly HR and the works council.
2. Just start: In a health check at the organization level, there are many stakeholders who would like to influence the topic. In order not to be slowed down by this coordination process, we recommend starting with the minimum compromise and limiting yourself to very general topics such as job satisfaction or the ROI of agile meetings. The workspace health check can be expanded flexibly at any time.
3. Less is more: Precisely because of the many stakeholders, there is a great temptation to include a great many topics in the Workspace Health Check. Unfortunately, this often leads to employees being overburdened as feedback providers and possibly to “survey fatigue”. So, even after the start, keep in mind not to overdo the number of survey topics. Only include Health Check Items that are truly relevant.
4. Use existing context: Many companies have defined corporate values. Ideally, these company values serve as a guide for Echometer’s workspace health check, which can serve as a culture barometer in this context. By taking up the corporate values, the commitment of the HR department and executives can also be strengthened to actively establish Echometer in teams across the company and thus to use the added values more comprehensively.

In addition to the Workspace Health Check, we also recommend one Team Health Check put on.

In Echometer, in addition to the suggested scale items, you can also formulate your own items for your health check.

Scale items are statements for which the survey asks for agreement:

You should pay attention to this when formulating your own scale items:

1. The right format: A Health Check item is answered on a scale from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”. Accordingly, you cannot use open questions here. Example open question: “How have you liked our Daily in recent weeks?” Rephrasing as a scale question for the Health Check: “I have really enjoyed our Daily in recent weeks.”
2. Ask about subjective impressions: A Health Check scale item is not suitable for querying objective facts. Example: “Our dailies last a maximum of 15 minutes.” This metric can be measured objectively and is not suitable for a Health Check. Instead, you can use a Health Check scale item to capture the more difficult to grasp subjective impressions: “Our dailies are time well spent for me.”
3. Specify the framework: For many topics, the frame of reference could be interpreted differently. For example: “We constructively question requirements.” In this formulation, it is open who “we” are and what requirements are meant. Depending on the desired framework, one could therefore be more specific: “As a team, we question the requirements of our Product Owner before implementing topics.”

Take a look at our tips for setting up health checks on team- as well as health checks at workspace level.

In the workspace health you will find an overview of the cross-team results, which are shown in various diagrams.

Filter groups of teams

If you have defined groups of teams, the dashboard offers filtering by these groups of teams. You can filter only those groups of teams in which at least 3 teams that are not excluded from the workspace have participated in the workspace health rotation. Groups of teams with 2 or less teams are accordingly not selectable in the filtering:

Spider chart & individual values

The spider chart shows average values across the categories of the items. In addition to the average, the highest and lowest 10% can be displayed.

Below this, the individual values per category are listed. In addition to the current average and trend on the left half, the graph on the right also shows the time history with average and top/bottom 10%:

Heatmap

The results of the teams per item are shown in the heatmap by category.

• Gray tiles have no current data points.
• Colored tiles are based on the current average.

If you move the mouse pointer over a tile, the average is displayed. With a click, the individual results over time are shown under the heatmap.

Depending on the settings of the workspace, the heatmap may be turned off to further protect the anonymity of the teams.

Every user should be considered in the workspace health. At the same time, individual persons should not be weighted twice. This happens when users are in multiple teams. It is therefore possible to exclude teams from the workspace health rotation.

A common use case for this function are teams that exist in addition to the fixed teams. In these cases, Workspace Health items (formerly “Echo Items”) would be requested twice for team members if members are also in other teams in parallel. Specifically, these duplicates often affect:

• Leadership teams in which the executives are also part of their own teams
• Project teams whose participants are also in functional teams
• Overlaps between squats, guilds and chapters (when organizing according to the Spotify model)

To exclude teams, select them in the team list in Workspace Administration and select “Exclude from Workspace Health” under Actions.

Teams can also be added back later.

Would you like to filter the results in the Workspace Health Dashboard in more detail - for example, by functional areas or business units?

Then team groups are the solution. Select the teams in the team list of the Workspace Administration and select “Move to group…” under Actions.

If you have already created team groups, select an entry from the list or create a new team group:

Do you want to check certain topics regularly across all teams? Then the workspace health rotation helps you to automate exactly that.

The standard rotation setting

As a workspace admin, you can adjust the workspace health rotation by activating the checkboxes to the left of the items:

By default, 2 of these activated items from the Workspace Health rotation are always suggested for the teams’ retrospectives. Team admins can customize these suggested items as they wish, unless you select the “Enforce rotation” checkbox:

Select fixed intervals for the rotation per item

There is also the option of setting additional fixed frequencies for the items:

• Weekly
• Every 2 weeks
• Monthly
• Every 6 weeks
• Quarterly
• Half-yearly
• Annually

If you select an interval, this item is suggested for every new retrospective of a team that has not yet answered this item within the selected period.

The rotation logic then works as follows:

• Items with a fixed frequency are only recorded exactly once in the selected period (e.g. quarterly / annually).
• “Items without frequency” are fillers for the 2 automatically suggested Workspace Health items in new team retrospectives.
• “Items with fixed frequency” always take precedence over “Items without frequency” to ensure that the frequency is maintained.
• For example, if there are only 2 items without frequency, they can be suggested several times in a row for team retrospectives if they are not displaced by any “items with frequency”.
• If you adjust the workspace rotation, the surveys already generated will not be affected.

Our recommendation for using the Workspace Health rotation

• Only select a fixed frequency for the most important 2 to 3 items and add any number of items with an open rotation. Remember: The more items rotate, the less frequently you will receive current data on the items.
• If you choose too many items with a fixed frequency, the items from the open rotation (depending on the retro interval of the teams) may not appear at all.

Separate workspace pulse check surveys

You would prefer to query the workspace items separately and not necessarily as part of the team retrospectives? No problem, then activate the “Workspace Pulse Check”.

The pulse check workspace automatically generates surveys and checks in all teams which items in the selected interval have not yet been answered by the team. All workspace items that have not yet been answered in the selected interval are then included in the team’s pulse check survey.

With the Workspace Pulse Check, you ensure that all workspace items are answered with a frequency by all teams - even if they have not carried out a retrospective within the interval.

Further details and video tutorial: Workspace pulse check