Week 17 Day 2: The Questions You Should Be Asking Weekly

The five weekly health questions are different from the Trust Audit questions in Week 15. The Trust Audit measures trust depth. These questions measure operational health -- whether your team has what it needs to do great work right now. Both are important. The Trust Audit runs quarterly. These questions run weekly. Together, they give you a comprehensive, real-time picture of how your team is actually doing.

Here are the five questions, and here is why each one matters. First: 'Do you know what is expected of you this week?' This catches clarity failures before they become missed deadlines. If someone cannot articulate their priorities, the expectations are not clear enough. Second: 'Do you have what you need to do your job this week?' This surfaces blockers, tool gaps, and resource constraints before they slow the team down. Third: 'When was the last time you felt recognized for your work?' This tracks recognition currency. If the answer is 'I cannot remember,' you have a recognition deficit that is eroding motivation. Fourth: 'Is there anything slowing you down that I could help remove?' This is the servant leadership question from Week 4 -- clearing the path rather than carrying the load. Fifth: 'Is there anything you are afraid to tell me?' This is the psychological safety probe. Most weeks, the answer will be 'no.' The weeks when the answer is 'actually, yes' are the most important conversations you will have. Do not skip questions. Do not rephrase them. Consistency is what makes the data comparable over time.

The five-question framework draws heavily on Gallup's Q12 engagement model (Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes, 2002), which identified 12 questions -- from a pool of thousands tested across 7,939 business units -- that predicted employee engagement, retention, productivity, and profitability. The first two questions ('Do you know what is expected?' and 'Do you have what you need?') are drawn directly from Q1 and Q2 of the Gallup instrument, which consistently emerge as the strongest predictors of baseline engagement. Research by Buckingham and Goodall (2019) in 'Nine Lies About Work' finds that the frequency of check-in conversations is a stronger predictor of team performance than their content -- teams with weekly check-ins outperform teams with monthly check-ins by 13% on engagement measures. The recognition question maps to Q4 of the Gallup instrument ('In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?'), which Gallup's research links directly to productivity and retention. The 'afraid to tell me' question serves as a continuous micro-assessment of psychological safety, which Edmondson's (2019) research identifies as the foundation for team learning, innovation, and error reporting. The instruction to maintain exact phrasing across weeks follows the psychometric principle of standardization (Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994) -- varying question wording introduces measurement error that makes longitudinal comparison unreliable.