Checking In

👥 Group Setting | 🕒 15 min | 🔄 Iteratively | 🛋️ Required Comfort: 2

Example

Use When

Your team wants to have regular check-ins on the psychological safety within the team.

Prerequisites

None

Tool Description

An important part of working with psychological safety is that of continously involving it in the work process. In order to do so, it can be helpful to have a specific call to action for discussing psychological safety as part of your team’s daily work. “Checking In” aims to engage your team in discussing aspects of psychological safety in their work on a regular basis.

1. Select one of the 7 statements (see “checking in” example page)
2. Have every team member anonymously rate the statement on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). This can be done by writing on post-its and putting the notes into a cup, or through online tools such as mentimeter.
3. Calculate the average score of the answers
4. Have an open-floor discussion about the statement, its score, and what that means in the team. “Checking In” can be conducted during an existing check-in meeting, such as a Daily Scrum.

Keep in mind that a unanomous "good" score might still warrant interesting discussion! Team members rarely give the same score for the same reason.

Purpose

“Checking in” exists as a call-to-action for discussing psychological safety in your team. Team members are enabled and encouraged to discuss psychological safety related subjects during their work on a daily basis.

Outcome

Continuously discussing and evaluating the psychological safety within the team can act as a temperature reading of the team’s well-being. Questions and concerns that might be of relevance to your team will surface more easily. Over time, these will hopefully surface not only during “Checking In”, but also in other places!