Check-ins best practices

Each week in Tability, you and your team are asked to fill out check-ins for your key results. In each check-in, you’re asked to update the metric, state your confidence on being able to achieve the key result, and then leave a comment. We built check-ins to be a quick process, but how do you get the most out of them?

Metrics

Updating your metric should be fairly straightforward. Tability will keep a log of where your metric is at each week and shows a trendline that can help you see if you’re on track.

Looking to save time while filling out your check-ins? Users on Plus or Premium plans can connect their key results to data sources to automatically pull in the metric when doing a check-in. As soon as you click on “Create check-in,” Tability will pull the data from the data source (like Asana, Clickup, Google Sheets and more), and put the most recent metric into the check-in for you.

Confidence

Your confidence rating is used to tell your team how confident you are on achieving your key result by the end of the quarter. Your confidence will likely change from week to week and should be based on both your metric and the other information that you have about your key result. Confidence helps other teams understand the full scope of the work happening on your key results.

We break confidence into three levels:

• Green/On track - You’ll likely achieve your goal

• Yellow/At risk - There are issues that are impacting your progress and could cause you to miss your target.

• Red/Off track - There are issues blocking your ability to achieve your key result.

These confidence levels aren’t permanent and shouldn’t be seen as a final grade on your work or your progress towards your key results. This is just to let the team know how goals are tracking and help you signal if you need help on your key results.

Note: avoid with setting confidence levels is marking a goal yellow or at risk for three weeks in a row. After three weeks, chances are that the goal is improved, but the owner is feeling nervous about maintaining momentum or that the goal has gone off track, but the owner doesn’t want to be seen as “failing” at their key result. Keeping goals marked as at risk for long periods of time prevents your team from having the proper sense of urgency.

Marking goals as red can be one of the most important things that a key result owner can do. When goals become off track, signaling that to the rest of the team can both create that sense of urgency and allow for an updated set of priorities that lets the key result get unblocked and back on track.

Analysis

Metrics and Confidence can only tell the team so much, especially if they don’t seem aligned (the metric is low but confidence is high, for example). This is where a comment in the analysis section will help shorten the time it takes for other teams to get context on your goal. A good comment contains the following:

• What got you to where you’re at?

  • What projects or initiatives have you done to make progress?

  • What external factors have played a role in your progress?

  • What blockers have you dealt with and gotten around?

• What do you have planned moving forward?

  • What are the next steps that you’re taking?

  • What is the timeline for your in-progress initiatives?

  • What is your expected outcome from your initiatives?

• What should the team be aware of?

  • What blockers do you currently have?

  • What help do you need from other team members or teams?

  • Is there anything you or the team need to do differently to stay/get on track?

How long does it take?

We anticipate that you shouldn’t need to spend more than 3-5 minutes writing a check-in per key result. Most users spend 10-15 minutes per week writing updates in total. We recommend putting a block on your calendar each week when your check-ins are due to give yourself dedicated time to complete your check-ins. If you can, having the entire team have the same calendar block can create a culture that understands the importance of communication and documentation.

What to do after writing check-ins?

The teams that work together the best don’t only write check-ins, but they also read them. Take another 15 minutes a week to asynchronously review the check-ins of your team members. Reading the check-ins and commenting on them can help identify overlapping efforts that can be combined or make asks/offers for help.