Check-In Icebreaker Template
Warm up the room and turn your meeting into a dynamic session with the Check-in Icebreaker Template by Toasty. Energize your team and connect people in surprising ways.
About Toasty’s Check-in Icebreaker Template
Everyone feels more productive when meetings have high energy and engagement levels. That’s why Toasty, a virtual meeting platform, developed this simple but powerful Check-in Icebreaker Template. Use this icebreaker before meetings to energize everyone right at the start of your session.
What’s a check-in icebreaker?
A check-in icebreaker is a fun exercise for you to do with your team before starting a long meeting or workshop. The purpose is to build trust and set the right mindset for the rest of the meeting, encouraging participants to be active, attentive, and engaged. This icebreaker helps you to warm up the room, giving people the opportunity to express how they feel with lightheartedness and humor.
This Check-in Icebreaker Template is also a great way to connect people through topics that are not work-related, allowing them to discover what they have in common and develop bonds with their peers.
Benefits of using the Check-in Icebreaker Template before meetings
According to Toasty, check-ins are key to creating a healthy company culture. There are many benefits to running an icebreaker before you start your meetings. Here are a few:
Raise engagement levels. Icebreakers before meetings help participants become more actively engaged, and it sets the stage for what’s to come.
Connect your team. The Check-in Icebreaker Template allows people to express themselves and connect in fun ways, even at work. It has the power to change people’s moods and create empathy.
Guide through board functionalities. Last but not least, icebreakers are a great educational tool. If you need your team to get familiarized with the board, the icebreaker is a great way to discover Miro’s functionalities so they can get acclimated to the tool. The Check-in Icebreaker Template helps people learn how to move elements around the board, add sticky notes, upload files, and interact in a collaborative setting.
How to use the Check-in Icebreaker Template
When you select the Check-in Icebreaker Template, you’ll find three activity frames:
1. Choose a character
Ask the participants to choose a character that reflects their mood and how they are feeling at that moment. Add a variety of memes, gifs, stickers, and any other images you find funny, lighthearted, or interesting.
2. Answer a question
Invite participants to answer a question. Add to this frame questions that will highlight personality traits, fun facts, and curiosities around your colleagues and team.
3. Repeat
You can repeat this exercise as many times as you want! Another fun twist is to add your character and answer to this frame and invite people to guess who you are.
What are good questions for check-in icebreakers?
There are many ways to approach questions for a check-in icebreaker. What’s important to keep in mind is that these questions are meant to connect and engage people. Fun facts about your team are an excellent choice, such as “Do you collect anything?” or “What’s your guilty pleasure?”. Questions about people’s skills may also interest the team and, at the same time, foster collaboration. Try questions like “What languages do you speak?” or “What was your first job?.”
How do you make check-in fun?
When running a meeting with the check-in icebreaker, ensure it will energize and engage people instead of making them feel uncomfortable or that the icebreaker is extra work. To make it more fun, remember to add quirky characters and popular memes and elaborate questions in which answers might surprise or connect people.
Get started with this template right now.
Mad Sad Glad Retrospective
Works best for:
Brainstorming, Ideation
It's tempting to measure a sprint’s success solely by whether goals and timelines were met. But there’s another important success metric: emotions. And Mad Sad Glad is a popular, effective technique for teams to explore and share their emotions after a sprint. That allows you to highlight the positive, underline the concerns, and decide how to move forward as a team. This template makes it easy to conduct a Mad Sad Glad that helps you build trust, improve team morale, and increase engagement.
SMART Goals Template
Works best for:
Prioritization, Strategic Planning, Project Management
Setting goals can be encouraging, but can also be overwhelming. It can be hard to conceptualize every step you need to take to achieve a goal, which makes it easy to set goals that are too broad or too much of a stretch. SMART is a framework that allows you to establish goals in a way that sets you up for success. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. If you keep these attributes in mind whenever you set goals, then you’ll ensure your objectives are clear and reachable. Your team can use the SMART model anytime you want to set goals. You can also use SMART whenever you want to reevaluate and refine those goals.
Competitive Analysis Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Decision Making
Developing a great product starts with knowing the lay of the land (meaning who you’re up against) and answering a few questions: Who are your competitors? How does your product or service compare? What makes you stand out? A competitive analysis will help find the answers, which can ultimately shape your product, value prop, marketing, and sales strategies. It’s a great exercise when a big business event is about to occur — like a new product release or strategic planning session.
Design Research Template
Works best for:
UX Design, Design Thinking, Desk Research
A design research map is a grid framework showing the relationship between two key intersections in research methodologies: mindset and approach. Design research maps encourage your team or clients to develop new business strategies using generative design thinking. Originally designed by academic Liz Sanders, the framework is meant to resolve confusion or overlap between research and design methods. Whether your team is in problem-solving or problem space definition mode, using a research design template can help you consider the collective value of many unrelated practices.
User Interview Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Product Management
A user interview is a UX research technique in which researchers ask the user questions about a topic. They allow your team to quickly and easily collect user data and learn more about your users. In general, organizations conduct user interviews to gather background data, to understand how people use technology, to take a snapshot of how users interact with a product, to understand user objectives and motivations, and to find users’ pain points. Use this template to record notes during an interview to ensure you’re gathering the data you need to create personas.
SIPOC Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Strategic Planning, Mapping
A SIPOC diagram maps a process at a high level by identifying the potential gaps between suppliers and input specifications and between customers and output specifications. SIPOC identifies feedback and feed-forward loops between customers, suppliers, and the processes and jump-starts the team to think in terms of cause and effect.