Check-in check-out is a care-oriented tool designed to find out how the members of a collective, work group, organization or assembly feel physically and emotionally before and after a meeting.
This tool helps to understand and share the (emotional) “status” of each participant in a metaphoric way without anyone feeling obligated to share intimate or personal information.
Recognizing these emotional and personal states is important to measure, channel and align individual energies towards a common goal, and gives the opportunity to accompany people during the meeting and after it.
One way to implement this tool is by using the indoor climate metaphor. Each participant is invited to describe the state of it through a weather forecast. At the beginning of the meeting, for check-in, each participant chooses the card that best suits their mood. If there is no card to represent them, the participant is invited to write their own weather condition on the blank cards. Thus, every time the deck of cards is put into use, the internal climates will increase. At the end of the meeting, for check out, the participant is invited to keep the same card or to change it if their internal climate has changed.