How a short daily check-in can dramatically boost team morale

“How are you feeling?”

“Is there anything stopping you being at your best today?”

“What was your favourite book when you were a child?”

“If you were a flower, what flower would you be?”

These may not be the typical questions to open a meeting, yet they are questions that can get your team’s day off on the right foot. This is a check-in. And if used in the right way, it can have an extremely positive impact.

Jason Furness, founder and director of Actualize, a learning and development company, has used this meeting format for more than a decade. He says, for a start, it’s a great way to get every voice into the room at the beginning of a working day. It can also be fun.

“It’s easy to get to a team meeting and not really be focused or paying attention to what’s going on,” explains Jason. “By bringing all the voices into the room you’re making sure that everyone is fully present and connected.”

A check-in can also be an opportunity for team members to get something off their chest. By asking the question ‘how are you feeling?’, you’re enabling employees to reveal their emotional state as they embark upon the day ahead. By sharing how they feel – even if it’s as simple a response as ‘frustrated’ or ‘distracted’ – you can begin to appreciate what’s going for them at that moment. For employers, this is a powerful tool that allows leaders to offer help and support if needed.

“There may be occasions when someone in the team isn’t feeling 100%, or they have something playing on their mind,” Jason says. “By asking the question ‘Is there anything stopping you being at your best today?’, it provides an opportunity to follow-up with an offer of help to solve a problem or by moving a task down a priority list. It’s also a great opportunity to celebrate positive experiences.”

He adds that a check-in can also be an icebreaker, depending on the question asked, and can boost creativity and overall productivity.

“By answering a question like ‘if you could travel anywhere in the world now, where would you go?’, it quickly facilitates real connection at a human level and gets people using their imagination.”

And this all can be done in a minute or so per person. Worth the investment? 

For further reading, see Insead Business School’s study on check-ins.