If you want a really fast way of gathering feedback from your team, I love running a retrospective session. 

The session framework comes from the Agile Software Development world, but you can apply it to almost any scenario where you’d like to get feedback from a group of people. 

You could be reviewing: 

• An event that everyone worked on 
• A piece of work that the team delivered 
• How the team has been working together the past month 

The key is that you want to quickly get feedback from the team on what went well and what could work better next time. The retrospective framework allows everyone to be involved without having to chase everyone to fill in forms and collate responses – you get all the feedback in real time.  

If you already use Microsoft tools and your team is used to Teams meetings – you can easily run the whole session using Microsoft Loop. (Note, as usual you’ll need the right Microsoft licence to use Loop.) 

The benefit of using Loop over other tools like Miro is that if everyone on your team uses Microsoft products already, they’ll be able to sign straight into Loop with their existing Microsoft account, and won’t have to sign up for a new tool. 

Here’s how it works. 

Set up a Microsoft Teams meeting with the team you want to get feedback from. It’s a good idea to set this up as soon as possible after the thing you want to review is complete. 

Ahead of the meeting, go to https://loop.cloud.microsoft/ – this is where you’ll set up your retrospective board. 

If you don’t already have a workspace – you can set up a new one by clicking the purple plus sign. Then give your new workspace a name (possibly something simple like retrospectives!)

Once you have your workspace, you can add a new page. 

If you want to get really fancy – you can add covers and icons. 

Now that you’ve got your new page, type a / and then start typing retrospective – you’ll see there is an option for a team retrospective: 

When you click on Team retrospective – Loop will set up the board format for you: 

This is a great format to start with, especially if you’re new to retrospectives. 

You’ll see there are now 3 columns for people to add their feedback into, under the headings ‘keep doing’ ‘stop doing’ and ‘start doing’. 

If you want to add more columns you can by using the plus sign. If you want to amend any of the titles, you can do that by clicking on them. 

Now your retro board is ready. 

It’s important that you set this up before the Teams call starts so that you don’t waste time getting it set up during the call, you want to keep the energy up from the beginning for the process to work well. 

When people arrive on the Teams call, you should make sure it’s clear to everyone what they are reviewing, and then share the Loop page link with them in chat. Click the purple share button in the top right to do this: 

Make sure you set the sharing settings so that people with the page link can edit – otherwise they won’t be able to contribute to the board. 

When everyone confirms that they can access the board, explain to them that they’ll have five minutes to add as many cards into each column as they can think of, by pressing the add card buttons: 

You should literally set a timer for this. 

Everyone will be able to see what everyone else is writing in real time while they’re on the board, but ideally you should screen share it into the meeting as well. 

If you have the same idea as a card that someone else has already written, instead of writing a new card with the same thing on it, you can click on the voting button to ‘upvote’ the feedback item: 

A plus sign will appear to tell you how many other people have upvoted that card. 

Once the timer is finished – go through each card in real time and have a short discussion on it. 

Go column by column discussing each card at a time. (This is so that you don’t end up discussing all the red/sad face items at once, as that can be a sapper for morale!) 

You can create a new column for discussed items and drag and drop each card in there as it gets discussed, so you won’t lose track of where you are. It’s a nice visual of how much you’ve gotten through / how much is left too.  

The key thing is to capture any actions that come out of each discussion and make sure someone is responsible for completing that action. You might use Microsoft Planner or ClickUp for this – it’s best to use whatever is the normal way that your team keeps track of their actions. 

And there you have it! You’ll have created a fast-paced way of getting feedback from your team in real time, giving everyone the chance to contribute, without pouring through lengthy form responses, and capturing actions for iterative improvements.