The Atlassian Team Health Monitor

You can usually feel when a team is struggling. Standups get quieter. The same complaints surface in every one-on-one. Work that used to flow now stalls for no clear reason. But “I think morale is low” is a hard thing to act on — it’s a hunch, not a starting point.

The Atlassian Team Health Monitor turns that hunch into a conversation. It’s a short workshop that gets your whole team in one room to rate how they’re really doing, name the sore spots out loud, and agree on what to fix first. No dashboards. No guesswork. Just an honest hour together.

The Atlassian Team Health Monitor is a facilitated workshop self-assessment. Your team gathers, looks at eight attributes that healthy, high-performing teams tend to share, and rates itself on each one using a simple traffic light: green (we’re solid here), yellow (some concerns), or red (this is hurting us).

Here’s the part that makes it different from most check-ins: it is not an anonymous survey. There’s no form to fill out alone at your desk. The whole point is the discussion. Everyone rates an attribute, the ratings go up where the group can see them, and then the team talks about why — especially when the colors don’t match. One person’s green next to someone else’s red is not a problem to smooth over. It’s the most useful moment in the room.

That makes the Atlassian Team Health Monitor a good fit when you want shared ownership of the result, not just data for a manager. It works best for an intact team that meets regularly — a squad, a project team, a leadership group — and that’s mature enough to be honest in front of each other. If your team is brand new, or trust is already badly frayed, a lighter or more anonymous check may be a gentler place to start.

The payoff is a team that has said the quiet part out loud and walked away with one or two concrete things to improve — together.

The Atlassian Team Health Monitor is part of the Atlassian Team Playbook, a free, public collection of group exercises (Atlassian calls them “plays”) that the company built from how its own teams work. The Playbook’s whole premise is practical: stop guessing about team problems, run a structured exercise, and act on what you learn.

The company describes the Atlassian Team Health Monitor as “a structured way for teams to self-assess against 8 attributes we’ve found to be common amongst healthy, high-performing teams.” In other words, it isn’t an academic instrument with decades of validation studies behind it. It’s a field-tested workshop, designed to be run by the team, for the team, on a repeating cadence so you can watch the colors shift over time.

One useful detail: Atlassian publishes role-specific variants of the Atlassian Team Health Monitor — versions tuned for project teams, leadership teams, and service teams — because what “healthy” looks like shifts with the kind of work a group does. The eight attributes below are the general-purpose set most teams start with. If one of the specialized versions fits your group better, the format is identical; only the attributes change.

The Atlassian Team Health Monitor’s eight attributes are written as short prompts to discuss. To make them easy to compare with other models — and to plug straight into a recurring pulse — we’ve rephrased each one as a positive statement your team can agree or disagree with, and grouped them under Parabol’s five Team Health categories.

Those five categories come from Google’s Project Aristotle research into what makes teams effective: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. Mapping Atlassian’s attributes onto them shows exactly which parts of team health the Atlassian Team Health Monitor covers well — and where it’s thin.

Here’s how the eight attributes line up:

Three of the eight attributes land here, which tells you where Atlassian puts its emphasis: whether people on the team actually trust each other enough to be candid. This category is about feeling safe to speak up, disagree, and ask for help without fear of looking foolish.

Dependability is about being able to count on one another to follow through. The Atlassian Team Health Monitor touches it through the team’s habit of improving how it works — a team that reliably learns from its mistakes is a team you can depend on.

This is the Atlassian Team Health Monitor’s other center of gravity. Structure and clarity means everyone understands the goals, the roles, and the way work gets done. Three attributes probe whether your team has the right setup to succeed.

Impact is the belief that the work matters and that you can see the difference it makes. The Atlassian Team Health Monitor covers it with a single, pointed attribute about value.

You’ll notice the table has no row for Meaning — the sense that the work is personally significant to the people doing it. The Atlassian Team Health Monitor doesn’t include a standalone item for it; “Shared understanding” carries the closest sense of purpose, but it’s really about clarity, not personal meaning.

That’s not a flaw, just a boundary. If you care about whether people find their work fulfilling, pair the Atlassian Team Health Monitor with a question or two on meaning from a model like Google Project Aristotle or Gallup’s Q12.

All eight attributes are drawn from the Atlassian Team Playbook — Health Monitor and the About the Team Health Monitor write-up.

Running it as a team health check workshop is refreshingly simple. You don’t need special training — just a facilitator, your team, and about an hour.

A few things to protect: keep it safe, keep the boss’s vote from dominating, and always end with action. A health check that surfaces problems but changes nothing will quietly teach your team that speaking up is pointless.

The Atlassian Team Health Monitor is one of the frameworks that shaped how we think about team health. Parabol’s Team Health check lets your team rate how you’re doing across five research-backed categories — psychological safety, dependability, structure & clarity, meaning, and impact — as a quick, recurring, anonymous pulse, then turns the results into a conversation.

Try Parabol Health Check

The Atlassian Team Health Monitor is one of several practical ways to take your team’s temperature. If you’re shopping for the right fit, these pair well with it:

You can browse all of these from the Team Health Check Tool hub.

Is the Atlassian Team Health Monitor a survey?

No — and that’s the point. It’s a facilitated workshop where the team rates eight attributes red, yellow, or green together and then discusses the results out loud. The conversation, especially where ratings disagree, is where the value lives. If you specifically want anonymity, run a separate anonymous pulse instead.

How many attributes does the Atlassian Team Health Monitor measure?

Eight: team cohesion, encouraging difference, engagement and support, continuous improvement, balanced team, suitable ways of working, shared understanding, and value and metrics. Atlassian also publishes role-specific variants — for project, leadership, and service teams — with attributes tuned to each.

How often should we run it?

Most teams run it every four to eight weeks. The Atlassian Team Health Monitor is designed to be repeated so you can track how each attribute’s color shifts over time — that trend matters more than any single session’s snapshot.

Is the Atlassian Team Health Monitor free?

Yes. It’s part of the free, public Atlassian Team Playbook, and you can run it with sticky notes and a whiteboard. Tools like Parabol simply make it faster to facilitate and easier to track over time.

What does the Atlassian Team Health Monitor not cover?

It’s light on Meaning — whether the work feels personally significant — and has only one attribute each for dependability and impact. Pair it with a model like Project Aristotle or Gallup’s Q12 if those areas matter to you.