Check-in questions for team meetings, daily check-ins and 1:1s

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A check-in question is the short prompt that opens a meeting or replaces one. Everyone answers it, in a round or in writing, so the group knows where each person is before getting into the work. The right question depends on what you need to learn. Below you will find questions for opening a team meeting, for a daily written check-in, for a weekly check-in, for one-on-ones and for engineering teams, each with a note on when it earns its place, plus the questions worth leaving out.

How to use these

Pick one or two questions, not five. A round of five questions across eight people is a forty-minute meeting.

Keep the same questions for a few weeks. Answers only become comparable when the question stays fixed, and people get quicker at answering.

Go first. When the person running the meeting answers honestly, everyone else's answers get more honest too.

Check-in questions for team meetings

An opening round: one answer each, in under a minute per person.

  1. What is one thing you finished since we last met? Starts the meeting on progress and gives quieter people an easy first sentence.
  2. What are you stuck on, even a little? "Even a little" is the important part. It lowers the bar for raising small blockers before they grow.
  3. What do you need from someone in this room? Turns the round into requests people can act on in the meeting itself.
  4. On a scale of one to five, how full is your plate this week? A number is quick to give and easy to compare across the table. Follow up only with anyone at either extreme.
  5. What should we make sure to cover today? Builds the agenda from the people in the room rather than from whoever wrote the invite.
  6. What changed since last week that the rest of us might not know? Surfaces news from customers, other teams or leadership that would otherwise arrive late.

Never make anyone explain a low number on question 4 in front of the group. Pick that up one to one.

Daily check-in questions

For a written check-in that replaces a daily meeting, usually posted in a shared channel at the start or end of each person's day. Three questions are enough:

What did you get done?
What are you working on next?
Is anything blocking you?

These are the standup questions, and they work in writing for the same reason they work out loud: each answer describes a state someone else can act on. Variations worth trying once the basic three feel stale:

  • What would make today a good day? Useful for teams that drift. It asks people to name a target before they start.
  • When do you expect the thing in progress to land? Adds a date to "in progress", which is what lets you plan around a check-in.
  • What did you learn that the team should know? Captures small discoveries, such as a flaky test or a customer's odd workflow, that never make it into a ticket.

If the check-in is written at the end of the day, the end-of-day report template is the same idea with a line for links to the work.

Weekly check-in questions

Weekly questions can be wider than daily ones, because there is a week of work to look back on.

  1. What are you proudest of from this week? People rarely volunteer this unprompted, and the answer tells you what they value in their own work.
  2. What took longer than you expected, and why? The "why" is where planning lessons come from.
  3. What is the one thing you most want to get done next week? One thing, so priorities come into the open.
  4. Is anything at risk of slipping? Asked weekly, this catches a slip while there is still time to do something about it.
  5. Is there anything you want to talk about one to one? Gives an easy route to raise something without doing it in front of the team.

For a written weekly update to stakeholders, use the weekly status report template instead. That one reports upward; these questions are for the team.

One-on-one check-in questions

A one-on-one usually opens with a check-in before any agenda items. These start the conversation without sounding like an appraisal:

  1. How are you, honestly, on a scale of one to ten? A number is easier to answer truthfully than "how are you?", which almost always gets "fine".
  2. What is taking most of your energy right now? Often different from what is taking most of their time.
  3. What is one thing I could do differently that would help you? Asked regularly, and acted on, this is how a manager earns honest answers later.
  4. Is there anything you are worried about that we have not discussed?
  5. What would you like more of, or less of, in your work? A gentle way into career conversations.

Let them answer before you bring your own list. A one-on-one is their meeting first.

Check-in questions for engineering teams

Engineering work has its own signals: pull requests waiting for review, flaky builds, on-call load. Questions that reach them directly:

  1. Is any pull request of yours waiting on a review? Review queues are the most common invisible blocker on a software team.
  2. What are you working on that is not on the board? Catches the support requests, incident follow-ups and favors that never get a ticket.
  3. Did anything break or behave oddly that we should look at? A low-ceremony way to surface flaky tests and quiet production issues.
  4. How heavy was on-call this week? If your team runs a rotation, the person coming off it is often the one who needs a lighter week.
  5. Is the next thing you are picking up clear enough to start? Unclear tickets cost more time than slow ones, and this finds them before work starts.
  6. What would you change about how we ship? Asked now and then rather than daily, it is how process problems reach whoever can fix them.

For a daily engineering check-in, add the first two questions to the standard three, and ask people to link the pull request or ticket in their answer. A link makes "almost done" something anyone can check.

Light openers

For a team that has been heads-down for weeks, a lighter opener helps a meeting start warm. Keep it optional and quick:

  • What is something small that went well this week?
  • What are you looking forward to outside work?
  • What is a tool or shortcut you started using recently?

Avoid questions that require sharing personal details, and let people pass.

Questions to leave out

"How many hours did you work?" Hours measure time at a desk and say little about what got done. Asking for them also tells people you are tracking them rather than the work.

"Why isn't this done yet?" in a group round. It puts one person on the spot in front of everyone. Ask it one to one, and phrase it as "what got in the way?"

Anything personal and compulsory. Check-ins about how people feel help when they are optional. Made mandatory, they turn into a performance.

A new question every day. Constant novelty makes answers impossible to compare, and the check-in starts to feel like a game instead of a habit.

If you run check-ins for a whole team

Asking the questions is the easy part. Reading ten answers every day, chasing the people who did not reply, and working out which "almost done" is really almost done is the part that wears managers down.

Eodly asks each person for a short daily check-in in Slack, Telegram or Discord, weighs each answer against what actually moved in GitHub and Linear, and sends you one page each evening: who shipped, who is blocked, and who has gone quiet. See a sample report.