Energy Levels

A check-in format that focuses on the team's energy rather than its tasks. Participants place themselves between fully charged, medium power and low battery, then reflect on what drained or fueled the sprint's energy. Tracking it over time helps spot burnout early and keep the team's pace sustainable.

Fully Charged

What gave you energy and kept you going

Roman

Shipping the migration gave me a week of momentum

Maria

Pairing days leave me with energy, not drained

Medium Power

Steady but unremarkable — the sprint neither lifted nor drained you

Anna

Steady sprint, but context switching wore me down by Thursday

Daria

Fine overall — the meeting load is the only drag

Low Battery

What exhausted you or drained your motivation

Maria

Third week of on-call and I have nothing left

Kirill

Rewriting the same spec twice killed my motivation

Sprint Energy

How the team's energy moved across the sprint as a whole

Daria

As a team we started strong and limped through the last three days

Roman

Energy dropped every time scope changed mid-sprint

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What is the Energy Levels retrospective?

The Energy Levels retrospective shifts the focus from tasks to people. Instead of asking only what got done, it asks how the team felt while doing it. By mapping personal energy across the sprint, the team spots overload and burnout risks early — before they turn into missed deadlines or quiet quitting.

Fully Charged — high energy and motivation
Medium Power — steady, sustainable pace
Low Battery — drained, close to burnout
Sprint Energy — what fuels or drains the team

Fully Charged

Here people note the moments when they felt energised and engaged. Understanding what creates this state — interesting work, clear goals, real wins — lets the team deliberately create more of it.

Medium Power

This column captures a steady, comfortable pace: getting things done without strain. It's often the healthiest place to be, and worth protecting from creeping overload.

Low Battery

Low Battery is where fatigue, stress and signs of burnout surface. Naming these honestly is the first step to fixing the workload, expectations or context that drain people.

Sprint Energy

This column looks at the sprint as a whole: which activities, meetings or habits gave energy and which took it away. The patterns here guide concrete changes to how the team works.

Benefits of the Energy Levels retrospective

Detects burnout risks before they become serious
Puts wellbeing on the agenda alongside delivery
Reveals which work energises and which drains
Encourages honest conversation about workload
Helps balance pace across future sprints
Strengthens care and trust within the team

How to run an Energy Levels retrospective

Create a board in QRetro from the Energy Levels template.
Invite the team and set a safe, judgement-free tone.
Ask everyone to place cards reflecting their real energy.
Look for shared patterns across the columns together.
Discuss what drains the team and what restores it.
Agree on a few concrete changes to protect energy next sprint.

Similar templates

Other formats teams pair with this one — open any of them as a board in one click.

Weather Forecast Retrospective

A vivid metaphor that describes the sprint as a weather forecast. Stormy stands for the turbulent issues, rainy for the troublesome challenges, cloudy for the things that turned out rosy and sunny for what felt bright and successful. The imagery makes it easy to express how the sprint felt and to spot patterns across several retrospectives.

ESVP (Explorers, Shoppers, Vacationers, Prisoners)

An opening activity that gauges how people feel about being in the retrospective itself. Anonymously, everyone places themselves as an explorer eager for new ideas, a shopper open to one useful takeaway, a vacationer glad for a break or a prisoner who'd rather be elsewhere. The result helps the facilitator read the room and adjust the session to the team's real mood.

SOAR Analysis

A strengths-based alternative to SWOT that keeps the conversation positive and ambitious. The team examines its strengths and opportunities, articulates its aspirations and defines the results that will show those goals were met. By focusing on potential rather than problems, SOAR is well suited to strategy sessions and teams setting a bold direction.

Pre Mortem

A forward-looking format that imagines failure before it happens. The team pretends the project has already failed and asks why — what went wrong, what wasn't done, which problems remain and what other concerns linger. Surfacing risks at the start makes them far easier to prevent than to fix after the fact.

Went Well - To Improve - Action Items

A classic retrospective for reviewing the results of a sprint or stage of work. The team captures what worked well, where it lost momentum and which concrete steps will move things forward. The simple three-column structure keeps the focus balanced between celebrating successes and turning problems into action items that the team can actually take ownership of.

Start - Stop - Continue

An action-oriented format that pushes the team toward concrete decisions rather than abstract discussion. Participants name practices worth starting, those to stop because they get in the way, and the ones that already work and should continue. The result is a clear, immediately usable list of changes that supports a culture of continuous improvement.

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