Checking in with stuff is a big part of management, collaborating, achieving goals and operating an organization in general.

Nearly all teams develop some sort of check-in scheduele over time to ensure that things run smoothly.

Check-ins help us:

• Short term
  • Identify and address friction and blockers
  • Exchange relevant information and sync up around priorities
  • Avoid tunnel vision and misunderstandings
• Medium term
  • Ensure that we are on track (or manage expectations if we're not)
  • Offer support and accountability
• Long term
  • Stop up, zoom out and reflect on the path taken, and the road ahead

Some check-in patterns that commonly develop in teams over time are:

• Daily check-in with personal progress and obstacles (i.e. daily standups)
• Weekly check-in with projects
• Monthly check-in with overall progress
• Quarterly check-in with high-level objectives
• Yearly check-in with employee engagement and development 

Check-ins as meetings

Commonly, check-ins are organized as meetings amongst team members. This may or may not result in an effective check-in.

It all depends on whether:

• The purpose of the meeting is clear to everyone
• The agenda is focused and effective in uncovering relevant information
• Stuff from previous check-ins can easily be resurfaced in order to hold people accountable to their commitments

To help alleviate these potential pitfalls, the platform supports health checks.

Health checks allow you to organize and share your thinking around who should check in with what, why, at which intervals and how. Health checks also allow you and your team to log actual check-ins with a health check, making it easier to share the information uncovered, agreements made, as well as ensuring that the health checks are actually being conducted.

Perspectives

Each health check is broken down into perspectives. Perspectives are the different aspects you want to look at when checking the health of something.

For instance, if the focus of a health check is projects, some relevant perspectives might include:

• Budget (are we over or under?)
• Deadlines (are we meeting them?)
• Progress (are we ahead or behind scheduele?)
• Blockers (what's keeping us from moving ahead?)

For each perspective, you can share insight around which data to review and which questions to ask in order to best evaluate the perspective.