Making check-in meetings effective

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Short check-in meetings, especially in the morning, can be a great tool to get your team on the same page and pumped for the day. Too often, though, these meetings are low energy, drag on past the limits of people's non-caffeinated attention spans, and end up leaving participants more in the mood for a nap than a productive day. Here are three ways that you can make sure your meetings are nothing to snooze through.

• Stand up! Standing not only makes sure no one surreptitiously falls asleep, it gets people's blood flowing and makes them feel more actively engaged. It also helps limit the time a meeting will go on for - who wants to stand around for a whole hour?
• Enforce a time limit! On that same note, limiting meetings to 15 minutes makes sure that people stay focused and do not drag the meeting past the point of productivity. More complex discussions can be tabled until a later time, when the relevant participants can drill down and non-relevant folks don't have to waste their time.
• Focus the meeting with three simple questions. Borrowing from the Agile software development world, you can keep your check ins focused by limiting discussion to three questions: What did we get do yesterday? What are we going to do today? Is there anything preventing me from going forward?

Does your team do a daily check-in meeting? Share what works, or doesn't, in the comments!

Donny Bridges is Research Director on the Candidate Project at NOI

Photo from sun dazed, via Creative Commons