Remote Meetings, Episode 1: The Check-In Question
We heard you, remote meetings and facilitating them is tough! If you ever send out a meeting invite, you are a facilitator. It’s requiring virtual jedi master skills that none of us knew we had. In this series, we’re going to provide you with a toolkit of jedi tricks to channel your force and better connect with your fellow humans.
Are you working remotely right now? If so, then you are a part of the 42% of people who are remote according to this recent Stanford article. It’s our new normal and in fact more and more businesses have made the decision to continue with a remote workforce on a permanent basis.
How many of your meetings have an awkward silence at the beginning that would be typically filled with a quick chat with the person sitting next to you? Whether you are riding the emotional coronacoaster, working on how you can support social justice, fleeing from wildfires, or getting out the vote, there’s a strong need to ask how people are doing. Enter the check-in question. Good check-in questions allow for a variety of responses and don’t overly emphasize perkiness (because, really, expecting perkiness from individuals who are burned out right now is unreasonable). If you missed our post on burnout, you can check it out here. Asking people to name their favorite superhero (insert eye roll) or their vacation spot they love the most (thanks for pointing out that I can’t take a vacation, Susan) aren’t the best ways to start a meeting in 2020.
It’s also important to decide how you want to facilitate the check in. Some teams may feel comfortable using the chat function in their remote meeting tool, but that may not work for all teams. If the team is large or there isn’t a high level of psychological safety among the team, consider using a tool like Slido or Mentimeter to collect responses anonymously. Or even using the anonymous polling function on most platforms.
5 MINUTE CHECK-IN TOOLS
Post a gif that reflects how you’re feeling: This is one of our favorites because it allows people to be honest if they’re not feeling great, but it can also be really funny. In a recent meeting, these were a couple of my favorites:
How are you feeling, in a word? This one can be anonymous and works really well if you’re using a tool that has word cloud functionality (like Slido or Mentimeter). If the word cloud is populating on a shared screen while people are typing, you might start to see some similar responses and that can help you gauge how the team is feeling before you start with the meeting/workshop agenda.
What are you grateful for today? This question works because even if your team isn’t feeling particularly positive, asking them to name something they are grateful for will help shift to the mood to a more positive place without asking them to be too perky about it. You could use chat, verbal round robin or change your image to a picture of what you are grateful for.
Whatever question you ask, make sure you take a few minutes to reflect on the responses you receive and thank your team for their participation. Just being able to acknowledge that not everything is great right now helps clear the air so that you can have a productive working session.
💡Quick tip on tips: grab a notebook, word doc, spreadsheet or any other place for a list to consolidate your toolbox of meeting tricks. Copy and paste the tools above so that you can easily have an accessible toolkit to make meetings more fun and connected.
As always, we’d love to hear from you. What check-in questions are working (or not working) for you right now?
TAGGED: REMOTE MEETINGS, CHECK-IN QUESTION, BURNOUT