Using the 4Ls Regularly can Improve Remote Team Interactions and Meetings

[#1]

Running an effective and productive remote meeting can be challenging.  Managing remote agile teams adds an additional variable to ensuring your team can successfully collaborate.  I have been managing remote teams for years and recently we have been using the 4Ls as a regular way to provide feedback and improve our meetings.  By making the 4Ls a regular and quick exercise we have constructed a way to quickly gather the information that makes our meetings and team interactions better.  Now you can too.

The 4Ls retrospective

Atlassian provides a framework for the 4Ls retrospective here:  https://www.atlassian.com/wac/team-playbook/plays/4-ls-retrospective-technique  Atlassian states “The 4 Ls is a retrospective technique where team members identify what they loved, loathed, learned, and longed for in a project or sprint of work. Using this simple framework, reflect back on your work and use what you've learned to improve as a team.”

While this play focuses on projects the technique of the 4Ls can be used in many ways to reflect and learn how your team can improve.

Apply it to your meetings

We all have team meetings on a regular basis.  We often become complacent as we attend regularly scheduled meetings.  We do the bare minimum to participate and over time the meetings are not as productive as they could be.  This is where the 4Ls play can be used.  We regularly drop the 4Ls at the end of a meeting to collect the following information:

• LOVED: what you loved about the meeting? (This is what you want to keep doing, or do more of, in the future.)
• LONGED FOR: what you wish we would stop doing in the meeting. (It could be more/less people attending, more/less time or frequency, or more time spent on a specific topic or activity.)
• LOATHED: what made the meeting worse? (What do you hope will never happen again?)
• LEARNED: what you learned from the meeting.

Our team members never know when we might ask them to complete the 4Ls.  We randomly ask for them at the end of a meeting.  We then take the feedback we get to improve or make changes to the meeting structure and activities that are performed during the meeting.  Sometimes the changes are successful, sometimes they need to be reworked and other times we need to abandon them altogether. 

By collecting this information on a regular basis, we can fine-tune our meetings, so our team members are getting more out of them.  I believe this occurs because the team members listen knowing that the 4Ls could be dropped at the end of any meeting, are actively changing the meetings to meet their needs, and become more invested in the meetings since they helped design them.

Be creative with plays

The great thing about plays is you can apply them to so many aspects of your team’s work/work life.  Be creative and think outside the box.  How are you using the 4Ls to improve your team?

[Mark Cruth]

Absolutely LOVE how you applied this play to meetings! Kudos @Brant Schroeder !!!

[Christine P. Dela Rosa]

Oooooh I like that you do the 4Ls impromptu sometimes. Curious @Brant Schroeder - was it a natural adjustment to run the Play without a typical cadence? Or was an adjustment not even necessary?

[Brant Schroeder]

No adjustment.  The team likes providing feedback and we just naturally agreeded that we could informally run the 4Ls to improve our meetings.  The team will sometimes prompt it as well if they see or feel that it would be a healthy activity.

[Summer Hogan]

Thanks so much for these great suggestions @Brant Schroeder! I am definitely going to apply this to my meetings. My team is very open and provides me feedback constantly, which I like. I also apply their feedback to make meetings and our interactions more effective. 

[Jonathan V.]

Thanks for this great write-up @Brant Schroeder. I will definitely be using this as part of my next team meeting when discussing with them about this past year.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Jonathan V_ That is awesome.  Please post back how it goes.  

[Johanna Pichotka_APTIS_]

I love this! I'm not managing a team but I'll definitely suggest that for one of our review meetings with the team. We often refine our meeting structure and sometimes have trouble finding the right rythm. Maybe this could help. 

[Floris van Himbergen]

I love this idea! Do you have any suggestions for getting colleagues to go along with this practice and put energy in their communication and feedback?

[Dan Breyen]

Meeting feedback is always good.  If people aren't finding value in the meeting, then it needs to be reevaluated.

[Charly _DEISER_]

Love it! thanks for sharing this tip

[Juan Carlos Vera]

Love it ;)