Vary check in questions

Towfiqu barbhuiya

Remote teams that check in to meetings can get stuck in a routine. And while routine has its place, it can also make people stop thinking. As with many working practices, mixing things up sometimes helps.

Implicit questions

The check in asks an open question – how each person arrives – to create space for whatever anyone wants to share. In practice you don’t need to ask the question after a while. When a team has become used to the practice, whoever talks first only has to say, ‘let’s check in’. The implicit question makes for the ultimate open question.

People usually share how they feel in the moment; how they arrive – happy, tired, energised, etc. But sometimes, someone has something that they can’t wait to share, or something they’ve held onto for a while. This variation keeps things interesting, and surfaces broader personal context. And if variation doesn’t occur unprompted, you can always provide an explicit prompt.

Explicit questions

To add variation, a meeting facilitator can ask a specific question. As well as mixing things up, check-in and check-out questions can prompt for more context about life outside the meeting. For example:

• ‘What will/did you eat for lunch today?’
• ‘What changed recently where you live?’
• ‘What cheered you up this week?’
• ‘What surprised you recently?’
• ‘What animal makes the best pet?’

Alternatively, you can focus questions on a time period instead of a subject: ask how people feel about this week, looking ahead or looking back. Sharing what you look forward to tells people a lot about your state of mind.

Explicit questions sometimes emerge spontaneously: the first person picks a theme, and everyone joins in. Then you can have a weather check in, a food check in, or a home-life check in, for example.

A good check-in prompt requires creativity. If the first person only talks about the weather, for example, and everyone else follows suit, you get a boring check in. But if the first person feels creative, a quirky check-in question that no-one has used before can turn things about before the meeting even starts.

Icebreakers

Quirky check-in questions work the same way as quirky icebreakers. I once attended a web development community tech meet-up where each arrival got a marker pen and a sticker:

Hi, you can call me…

I built my first web application…

Like any good icebreaker question, you can answer this kind of prompt in any number of ways:

• … using Perl
• … in 1999
• … in secret
• … to show off.

You want variation in how people complete the prompt, perhaps even using the statistically least likely words. In a way, check-in questions and icebreaker prompts aim for the opposite of good survey questions’.

Working practice variation

Explicit check-in questions prompt the team to refresh the check-in practice, so it doesn’t get stuck. Similarly, teams or their coaches often deploy a variety of agile retrospective formats, to give the team another angle on continuous improvement.

In general, practices that aim to get people thinking can become stale. When they become automatic enough to bypass the thinking part, they stop working. When you want to spice things up, sometimes you don’t really need something spicy, and something different will do.