Check in to online meetings
Building connection in distributed and remote teams 2025-04-29 #remote
- Check-in practice ←
- Check-in questions
Distributed teams need to build personal connection between team members, just like co-located teams. But they don’t do it the same way. Fully-remote teams develop deliberate practices, such as ‘checking in’ at the start of meetings, to share human context, and to get to know each other.
Meeting arrival
When you work in an office, and have a meeting in a meeting room, attendees don’t all arrive at the same time. While you wait, you chat, or observe and read the room. When someone arrives, their body language gives you a sense of their physical, mental and emotional state. The physical space creates space for these small interactions, which help build personal connection.
Online meeting organisers typically neglect meeting arrival. Joining these online meetings disorients you as much as teleporting directly to a meeting room would. Online meetings need a practice that creates space for arrival and achieves the same opportunities for people to connect.
Check in
The online meeting check in practice starts every meeting with a question that curates arrival:
How do you arrive, as a person, right now?
Attendees take turns to answer, typically each sharing a few sentences. For example:
- ‘I didn’t sleep last night, and I don’t feel so good’
- ‘I just went for a walk in the sun, and I feel great!’
- ‘I’ve had too many meetings today, and feel low-energy’
- ‘I had just enough time for a satisfying lunch’
- ‘I skip’ (spoken in introvert-who-needs-to-recharge)
Sometimes one person elects to ‘skip’, and another has a whole story to tell. Both signal how they feel right now.
Talking about ‘how you arrive’ feels weird at first, but quickly becomes a natural way to start a meeting. More importantly, you immediately get the benefit of knowing what to expect from different people during the meeting.
Check out
Ending the meeting with a check out mirrors the check in, with a similar question:
How do you leave this meeting?
This lets people share more of their personal context, as at the start of the meeting. You also get two kinds of feedback on the meeting itself. First, it feels natural to share how you feel compared to the start of the meeting, whether energised by the discussion or tired out by concentrating hard. Second, the check out can function as a mini-retrospective for the meeting.
Getting to know each other
Using this check-in practice daily, over a period of months, has a deeper effect. You pick up details of team members’ lives – family, travel, hobbies, etc. These details accumulate, and as you learn more about each other’s lives, you get to know each other better.
Large geographic distances may separate you from remote colleagues, but without daily relocation to an office, you can find yourself closer and more connected to each other’s daily lives.
Deliberate practices
Checking in at the start of the meeting becomes a daily practice, for a fully-remote team. Like working out loud, check ins replace the way things work in a physical working environment, but as a deliberate practice.
Effective remote teams systematically use deliberate practice to compensate for what happens automatically in an office. These practices offer straightforward solution to the obvious challenges of working remote. You just have to do them.
