How to organize an efficient yearly team retrospective in an international group

Bernice has seen much more interest in the topic of continuous improvement, particularly with increasing digitization, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the pandemic, which has led people to become much more interested in improving their ways of working.

In their search for improving their quality of life, tools like Klaxoon have found new fans, as the traditional meeting is shunned in favor of something much more interactive and creative.

The challenge: increase participation in yearly retrospective meetings

Bernice decided to use Klaxoon after discovering it as a tool promoted at Danone. Since they had already endorsed it, she decided to give it a try as a way to shake up her usual meetings, and move away from the sometimes ‘boring’ meetings that involved sharing presentations with little or no active participation. Bernice realized that it was getting hard to generate and collect ideas, so she was looking for a space that would allow her to do this, as well as encourage the involvement and participation of everyone.

With many meetings every day, Klaxoon has really helped Bernice make them more effective, and she has seen a real upturn in the amount of participation and ideas being generated.

The solution: Klaxoon’s ready-to-use Retrospective template

For Bernice, Klaxoon seemed to be a great way to make an impact during the Ambition Meeting that Danone organizes every year. The meeting is a kind of retrospective of the year, designed to analyze what worked well (successes) and what could be improved. This kind of meeting is really effective, as analysis has shown that teams who debrief more often are 20% more effective in their teamwork than counterparts who don’t have such a ritual.

The main purpose of this meeting is to generate and create an action plan of new ideas for the upcoming year. The Continuous Improvement managers from each region are getting together, and the tool that was historically used for this was Webex. But once Bernice discovered Klaxoon, she knew it had the potential to work really well in the Danone workplace, and she decided to try it during the upcoming Ambition Meeting.

To organize the meeting, Bernice went into the Klaxoon template library, and chose the Retrospective template. This was a good fit for her own meeting, which was organized remotely with a total of 11 participants.

Each Continuous Improvement manager had been assigned a topic, with 5 main topics in total being covered: learning, organization, governance,... Continuous Improvement managers were asked to prepare their topics in advance, asynchronously, so that they wee ready to participate during the meeting itself.

In this case, the meeting was held on Webex and Klaxoon simultaneously. Bernice used the Klaxoon Retrospective Template exactly ‘as it is’, she didn’t need to change anything, which saved her a lot of time. It was also great to discover that it took very little time to prepare, no longer than a few hours.

Bernice added a category for each topic, and five colors that represented whether it was:

• An action the team had to keep doing;
• An action they planned to do less;
• An action they planned to do more;
• An action they planned to stop doing;
• An action they planned to start doing.

Bernice kicked off the meeting with 15 minutes of brainstorming, with the aim of giving everyone the time to think about what they wanted to get out of the retrospective. She used the Klaxoon timer to make sure everyone had enough time to generate ideas.

Once all participants had shared their ideas, they used the Like button to prioritize and select the most relevant ideas, by voting for their favorite ones. This meant that everyone could quickly split into breakout rooms to discuss the action plan and ideas for the future.

The result: less time spent in meeting for more efficiency

Bernice was happily surprised to find that the meeting took less than 2 hours in total, with less than thirty minutes on the retrospective part. Using Klaxoon made the whole process very efficient, and this is very important with a large group of busy people.

Thanks to Klaxoon, Bernice felt that there were more ideas generated overall, especially in comparison with using Excel or PowerPoint, both of which have been used in the past, but were not as fluid.

Bernice also really appreciated the Klaxoon timer, which enabled everybody to get involved, since people had a clear idea of the time they had to brainstorm, and were then prompted to generate their ideas directly on the Board.

Overall, Klaxoon has had a very positive impact on Bernice’s work, making her meetings much more participative and engaging for everyone involved. And what if it could help you as well?