While working remotely, do this one thing with your team — every week.

Joe Martin
4 min readMar 19, 2020

The 6-Week Cycles book is a guide that helps teams work for 6-weeks, then take off for 2. BUT! It’s not as simple as just marking 2 weeks off in your calendar. Working this way requires that your team learns to excel in communication. One of the cornerstone communication methods is the weekly check out meeting.

I have my friend Angela Vitzthum to thank for telling me about this idea. Over four years ago, I implemented these weekly check out meetings for my team.

With them, we saw incredible growth in interpersonal communication, empathy, and an improvement to our overall culture. It became our favorite meeting — which, we didn’t even know we could have “favorite meetings.”

A team member we had never met in person, who worked in South Africa said, “I look forward to these meetings, which isn’t something people normally say.”

Every Friday afternoon hold a check out meeting

No one needs to prepare anything for this meeting; they just need to show up and talk about what went well vs. what didn’t go well. That’s …that’s it. JUST do this one thing, and I guarantee you’ll see absolutely incredible results amongst your team.

How to run a check out meeting

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Joe Martin

Entrepreneur, author, and TEDx Speaker who believes real world interactions are more valuable than digital ones.