Team Energy Check: A 15-Minute Energy Check Retrospective

An energy check asks each person three things: what gave me energy, what drained me, and what would recharge us. The first two are personal, about your own sprint. The third is about the team, and it's where the action comes from. It takes 15 minutes and can surface strain before it shows up in missed work.

The three columns

Write "me", then "us". The first two columns are in the first person on purpose. "I lost two evenings to the release" says more than "the release was stressful". The third column switches to "us": a recharge is something the team does together, not advice for one person.

Where it comes from. No single person is credited with it, and most retro tools have a version. The closest documented one is Retromat's How's your battery?, credited to Anh Bui: people color in a battery, then talk about what costs them energy, what gives them energy and what would help.

When to use it (and when not to)

Use it when:

• the team just came out of a crunch: a big release, a migration, a long on-call stretch
• delivery looks fine but standups have gone quiet and people seem flat
• you've changed something big (team size, on-call rota, office days) and want to know how it lands
• you want a light monthly check that ends with one change

Pick something else when:

• people don't feel safe writing honest drains in front of each other. Run a Psychological Safety Check first.
• the drain is one person's. That's a one-to-one with their manager, not a team board.
• the problem is clearly about process, not energy. A Start Stop Continue gets to behavior changes faster.

How to run it live (15 minutes)

1. Check the last recharge. Open the Previous Retro tab in the Action Items panel. Did last time's recharge happen, and did it help? If it was dropped, ask why first.
2. Write silently. Set the shared timer for five minutes. Remind people they can turn off Show Name before posting a drain.
3. Group the drains. Drag notes about the same cause onto each other. A drain three people wrote is the signal. A drain one person wrote is still real, but it may be a one-to-one topic.
4. Vote on recharges only. Energy and drain notes aren't things to rank.
5. Discuss one drain, not all of them. Fifteen minutes covers the top shared drain and the recharge that answers it. Read the energy column aloud first: it tells you what to protect.
6. Pick one recharge. One, with an owner and a date to check it.

How to run it async over a sprint

Energy is easier to judge on the day than from memory two weeks later, so an energy check works well async.

1. Day 1: the board is ready as soon as someone clicks Start New Retro after the last retro (pick Energy Check there with Try a different format if your room uses other columns). Ask everyone to add one note on a set day each week, such as Friday afternoon: what gave you energy this week, or what drained you.
2. During the sprint: people add notes on the board or in Quick Notes on the Team Room page. Specific beats vague: "Thursday's 2-hour planning", not "too many meetings".
3. Mid-sprint: the facilitator reads the drains. If one theme is already obvious, such as on-call noise, raise it now. Don't wait two weeks to fix an alert that wakes people up.
4. Two days before the end: everyone adds recharge ideas and votes on them.
5. The day before: the facilitator groups the drains and reads the CarrotIQ Sprint Summary.
6. Retro day: a 10-minute call to agree the recharge. Or fully async: the facilitator posts the top shared drain and the most-voted recharge, and the proposed owner accepts by end of day.

More in how to run an async retrospective.

11 example prompts

What gave me energy

1. Which task did you lose track of time on?
2. When did you finish a day with more energy than you started?
3. Who made your work easier this sprint?

What drained me 4. Which meeting would you skip if you could? 5. When did you work late, and why? 6. Where did waiting or context switching cost you the most? 7. What did you do that felt pointless?

What would recharge us 8. What would give you back one hour of focus each week? 9. What did we stop doing that you miss? 10. What would make on-call less tiring? 11. Which drain could we remove entirely, rather than work around?

Facilitator tip and a common pitfall

Tip: keep the boards and compare them. A drain that shows up in three energy checks in a row isn't a bad week. It's how the team works. Before each energy check, open last month's board from the Team Room's sprint list and read its drains aloud. "This is the third month on-call noise is our top drain" lands harder than any single note.

Pitfall: a recharge that adds work. Tired teams often pick a recharge like "a weekly wellbeing meeting" or "a team social every Friday". Both add to the calendar of people who just said they have no time. Good recharges remove something: a meeting, an alert, a handoff. Ask of every recharge: what does this take away?

How AI helps with this format

On Pro AI (and during the free trial), CarrotIQ handles the admin:

• Group names. Drains repeat in different words. Drag "paged at 2am again" onto "disk alert fires every night" and CarrotIQ names the group, for example "On-Call Alert Noise".
• Summaries. The Sprint Summary covers each column. Comparing the drain summaries from a few months shows whether the same theme keeps coming back.
• Suggested action items. CarrotIQ Suggest drafts an action from the notes, weighting the most-voted ones, which here are your recharges. Check that the draft removes work rather than adding it, then assign an owner.

Example action items

Next time, the Previous Retro tab shows these. See retrospective action items that actually get done.

Use this template in Retro Rabbit

1. Start a 14-day free trial. No card is needed.
2. For one retro, click Try a different format in Start New Retro and pick Energy Check: it applies to that retro only, and your Team Room keeps its usual columns. To make it the room's format, choose it under "Browse all formats" when you create your Team Room, or later in the Team Room's Settings.
3. Tell the team they can turn off Show Name before posting, so a drain can go on the board without their name shown.

See pricing for plans.

Related formats

• Weather Report: a faster read of the team's mood
• Psychological Safety Check: when people won't write honest drains
• Mad Sad Glad: when feelings are tied to specific events in the sprint
• Appreciation Round: ending a hard stretch on a good note
• More formats in Team health
• All retrospective templates