Soil and Shadow Blog

15-Minute Team Retrospectives for Flow and Connection

Written by Nikki Silvestri | Jul 19, 2022 9:00:00 AM

Personal Check-In:

Digital detoxes are A+, especially when you add meditation.

Tool of the Day: Retrospective.

I'm seeing an increasing number of teams have emergent goals. Retrospectives support the need to pivot quickly with moving targets. Many teams have the experience of repeatedly offering feedback, being "heard" in a meeting, and not seeing their feedback integrated into systems. During retrospectives, you can see which problems are coming up consistently before enough time has passed for teams to feel like their feedback isn't being taken seriously.

Weekly 15-Minute Retrospective Format:

  • 2 min: One Word Check-In - it's either "how are you today?" or a fun question. "What's one word about something that made you laugh recently?" "What's the name of a tv show you're into right now?"

  • 5 min: Timed Writing of Priorities, Needs, and Retrospective - In the chat box, each team member writes their priorities for the week, any needs they have, and a retrospective for the previous week. The retrospective questions can be as simple as "what worked well," "what didn't work," and "what needs improvement," or a different set of retrospective questions.

  • 7 min: Discussion - This is where folks discuss what's in the chat regarding the priorities, needs, and retrospectives. It needs a strong facilitator to keep it on track. An administrative person can pull the chat and create tasks in your project management software.

  • 1 min: Fun Outro - Stand up and wiggle! Everybody scream! Twinkle fingers! The options are endless.

 

How did this resonate? How will you implement or review your practices with yourself and your team? 

I’m holding our collective mental/emotional health with tenderness and care. I’m with you.

Nikki

If you’d like our team to support you with implementing practices like this on your team, we’d love to speak with you - you can schedule a call here.