Team mood check

One person creates the room and shares the link. Everyone opens it, types a name and answers the question on a 1 to 5 scale. Until someone hits Reveal, the room shows only who has answered, never what they answered, so the first person to speak does not set the tone for everyone else. The reveal shows the spread, the average and, on a named round, who sat where.

Keep it to one question and a couple of minutes. The number is a prompt for a conversation, not the conversation itself. A 3.8 with two people at 1 is a very different week from a flat row of 4s, which is why the distribution is the part worth looking at.

Default to anonymous for anything sensitive: workload, burnout, confidence in a deadline, how a reorg landed. If people suspect their answer will be read back to them later, they answer with the number they think is expected, and the whole exercise measures nothing.

Never use the results in a performance conversation. A mood check is a signal about the situation, not a rating of a person, and the moment it is quoted in a review the team learns to stop being honest in it.

The facilitator answers first, out loud, and answers honestly. If the person running the check always says 5, everyone else rounds up to match. Going first with a real 3 is what gives other people permission to use the bottom half of the scale.

Seven people answer "how sustainable did this week feel?" and the reveal shows one 5, two 4s, two 3s, one 2 and one 1. The average comes out at 3.1, which on its own would read as a perfectly ordinary week. The bar chart says something else: the answers are spread across the whole scale, and two people are in the bottom half of it.

Most common reads "ok" here, because the 3s and the 4s are level on two each and a tie is settled in favour of the lower face. Worth knowing before you quote it in a summary. The bars are scaled against the tallest bar rather than against the size of the room, so a column reaching the top of its box means "more people than any other answer", not "most of the team".

What to do with that spread is ask an open question, not chase the two low answers. Something like "what made this week harder than last" lets whoever is at 1 answer without being identified as the 1, which matters whether or not the round was anonymous.

The question belongs to the room rather than to whoever created it. Anyone can rewrite it, up to two hundred characters, and it locks at the reveal so the wording cannot change under answers people have already given. Editing it again and pressing New round asks the fresh question of everybody and clears the previous answers.

Decide on anonymity in the same breath as the question, because the toggle is fixed as soon as the first answer lands. A round stays open until somebody reveals it, which needs at least one answer to be in, and a reveal cannot be undone: changing an answer after that means running another round.

Keep the scale meaning the same thing week to week. Five on a question about workload is a good week to one person and a full week to another, and the number is only comparable against your own previous rounds if the question and the direction of the scale stay put. If you need to ask something different, ask it as a second round rather than reworded halfway through the first.