When

Check-ins increase the likelihood that group members will feel comfortable, participate, and collaborate.

As such, if your group has to accomplish anything—regardless of whether it meets regularly or gathers for a single meeting, whether members know one another well or are strangers—check-ins can help.

Given their clear benefits, relative ease of use, and short duration—as well as the cost of not doing them—experienced leaders put a check-in on the agenda for most meetings. It’s their default.

The more useful question, then, is not when to use them, but when not to: when are check-ins neither necessary nor advisable?

A check-in is not the right tool when the purpose of a meeting is exclusively to disseminate information to people who will not interact either during or after the meeting. Informing a large group of new hires about their health plan options, presenting a reading from a novel, orienting 30 prospective college students and their families to their campus visit…these don’t merit the time or energy check-ins require.

Beyond that, the only hard and fast rule is this: use check-ins deliberately. Consider the overall goals of the group, the objectives for the meeting, the group’s stage of development, and logistical constraints. Using your best judgment, conduct a check-in whenever it seems appropriate.

There are no orthodoxies; you never have to do a check-in. Do it only when it will further your goals.

The following are among the circumstances in which it might be wise not to use a check-in:

You Might Not Use a Check-in When:

• A group has met recently and you used a check-in at the previous meeting.
• You will employ another strategy to encourage participants to talk and connect with one another.
• A check-in might feel like a distraction because a pressing issue—an interpersonal conflict or a business crisis, for example—is on group members’ minds (though you might be able to create a check-in question that effectively addresses the issue).
• Time is too short—a 15-minute huddle for a group of 20, for example.
• There are too many people attending the meeting to enable everyone to speak (visit the Frequently Asked Questions page for alternate approaches you can use under these circumstances).
• The setting or acoustics will make it too difficult for group members to hear one another
• A senior leader is joining your meeting, and though it may be tempting to demonstrate your group’s rapport, you want to respect their time.
• You’ve decided that for this group, at this moment, it is not essential to enable participants to feel comfortable, participate, and invest in their endeavor
• You just don’t feel like it.

You never want group members to experience a check-in as uninteresting or irrelevant. That will frustrate them and only inhibit your efforts to engender high-performance. (As explored elsewhere, though minor resistance at the start is to be expected, barring other issues, such opposition dissipates quickly when you create useful check-ins.)

Nowadays we have more and more plane connections, and more and more phone connections, but sometimes it can seem, fewer and fewer human connections.

PICO IYER

Flexibility is important too. I attended a remote meeting in which four out of the five members spontaneously discussed a recent national (US) sporting event. Rather than do the planned check-in, the leader skillfully engaged the remaining participant in conversation, and then—everyone having spoken and “checked in”—moved on to the substance of the meeting.

Note that check-ins are particularly essential at the start of a group’s life. As an easy, proven way to gather and orient members, to build psychological safety, and to set norms, they should almost always be on the agenda when groups are first forming.