What Is A Team Reflection?

A team reflection is a planned meeting where team members openly discuss and learn from recent work experiences. The goal of a team reflection is to receive less filtered feedback than in formal meetings

In this interesting activity, people openly share their feelings and concerns through a reflective process or practice.

Reflective process is a method for practitioners to enhance their understanding of their performance through increased self-awareness. By recognizing the nature and impact of one’s work, practitioners are presented with opportunities for professional growth and development.

In more scientific terms, a typical reflective process can be grouped into three stages:

• Reporting and responding (Pick a theme)
• Relating and reasoning (Share feelings and/or observe and reflect on the experience)
• Reconstructing (Understand and pick action)

A team can reflect on anything: the efficiency of inner communications, friction with other departments, client relationships, or a year’s progress.

There are several roles involved in conducting a successful team reflection meeting:

• Learners: People on the team who share lessons through the lens of personal experience.
• Facilitators: People who encourage sharing feedback with others and organizing it.
• Timekeeper: A person is responsible for equal input and timing.
• Note taker: Have someone on your team take notes or use note-taking tools that will preserve your ideas.

How to Run Team Reflections

Pick Your Rhythm: How often you conduct your team reflection meetings is crucial for two reasons.

First, cadence defines the scope. A once-a-year reflection and once-a-month will focus on different things.

Seconds, team reflection meetings can’t be one-off and required at least some kind of frequency to be effective.

Your team likely won’t get used to being open in one session. On the other hand, too frequent reflections will be detrimental as your team will quickly run out of things to discuss.

Pick Theme(s): A fantastic quality of reflections is that you can reflect on pretty much anything.

Here are just some themes that you can explore and reflect on within your team:

• Highs and lows.
• Project experience
• Client relationships
• Department merging
• Company take-off
• Internal communications
• Excessive meetings

If you decide to pick several themes for one meeting, prioritize the topics and allocate enough time for each.

Identify Roles: Successful team reflections require some organization, so make sure you will have someone to monitor the time constraints, present questions, organize feedback, and take notes.

Most of these tasks can be done automatically, so use specific tools if you want to save time while keeping the process organized.

Without forcing people into a specific role, you should understand who are the facilitators and learners on your team because it simplifies the flow of a meeting: it will be easier to see if too much time is spent on organization and not reflecting and sharing experiences.

Benefits of Team Reflections

• Self-awareness. First and foremost, team reflections help team members to understand and accept their inner feelings and how they affect various aspects of their work.
• Better understand “Why”. Team reflections are great for understanding the “Why” behind the tasks or the lack of it. Ultimately, having purpose affects team motivation and morale, as research shows that purpose-driven teams are more productive.
• Expand mindset. Due to the non-rigid and free-flowing nature of a reflection meeting, team members are more likely to share new ideas and perspectives, adapting and developing more creative problem-solving approaches.
• Transparency. Lack of transparency in teams leads to a trustless environment where some demoralizing issues that affect productivity are never brought up. Frequent reflections in teams lead to more open team environments and ultimately boost trust in all other types of team communication.
• Alignment. Many work-related issues arise due to misaligned expectations towards projects and people’s roles within them. Reflection sessions are great for surfacing alignment issues within teams.
• Stronger relationships. An open work environment with high levels of self-awareness facilitates more profound relationships both within a team and outside of it, such as with clients and external shareholders.