Year-end meeting template

How to run an end-of-year retrospective with your team

The best teams run on honest conversations. But it can sometimes get tricky to get the team to speak up. Retrospectives are perfect to reflect and improve the way the team works day-to-day, and to strengthen relationships.

Often associated with the Scrum framework or agile methodology, retrospectives are meetings about the team, for the team, and run by the team.

Put simply, the retrospective meeting consists of reflecting on events and work done, learning from it, and collectively deciding on action items to improve going forward. You can, of course, run these at the end of projects and on a regular cadence if your team works in sprints, but you can also get creative and run one as the year ends too!

Questions for your team retrospective

In this special custom poll template, we’ve built questions to help you uncover the following:

• When team members have felt most motivated during the year.

• Which times were challenging.

• Things or people they feel grateful for.

• Your employees’ sentiment on their team experience throughout the year.

The positive impact of retrospectives

Relationships built on a foundation of trust and transparency lead to better engagement and higher performance. Running retrospectives can have many positive impacts:

• Creates a safe space for the team to speak up.

• Better team productivity and improved velocity.

• Higher collaboration, communication, trust, and team spirit.

• Develops a growth mindset among team members.

• Stronger ability to manage conflicts between peers.

• Stronger, more resilient team relationships.

Additional resources

Learn more about retrospectives with this resource:

How to hold the best retrospective meetings