The most important five minutes of your work week

Executive overview

Employee anxiety is rising — over half are reportedly crying at work, driven largely by AI uncertainty. A single five-minute habit at the start of each weekly meeting addresses this directly.

Go around the room and have each person share one piece of good news: personal and professional.

The five-minute good-news check-in builds psychological safety, equal voice, and human connection in one move.

Why the check-in works

• Shifts attention toward what's working, not just problems
• Surfaces mental health signals — repeated lack of good news is a prompt to intervene
• Professional good news compounds: last week's win creates accountability for this week's
• Personal sharing creates the "average social sensitivity" Google's Project Aristotle identified as essential for effective teams
• Equal talk time — the other Project Aristotle factor — is reinforced by the round-robin format

How to run it

• Do it weekly, not daily
• Everyone shares one personal and one professional piece of good news
• Monitor participation: if some voices dominate, explicitly invite the quieter ones
• For remote teams, this is even more critical — it replaces organic hallway connection