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.