How not to bore your team during company meetings? Avoid boring meetings!
If you have a focused and productive meeting at regular intervals, you can ensure that your necessary contact with your team will be kept to an efficient minimum.
However, meetings can be complete-time drains. The never-ending debate and arguing can suck the energy and enthusiasm out of everybody present if they are poorly executed. Steve’s here to tell you how to avoid this and get it right.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- When setting up a regular meeting, stick to the same time and invite list and the same agenda. In this way, your team knows that the appropriate person will address their question at the proper time.
- Be very clear on the length of the meeting and stick to it. This gives people confidence that they can fit into the meeting. That it’s not going to overrun and leave them short of time.
- At your first meeting, brainstorm on everything that is going on in your business that warrants a discussion or solution. You can rationalise all that into grouping by subject or department, the time required or urgency.
- Create specific goals from this list for each quarter. Leave anything that does not pertain to the goals on the list for the next quarter.
- Decide that once your list is complete. Not all staff need to be present at the meeting for the issues that do not pertain to their function.
How not to bore your team during company meetings
- Before the meeting starts, a quick session is completed to go through any issues that have been voiced during the week and prioritise them. This is done in case time runs out. Then there is an update stage, an information-sharing stage to keep everyone informed of relevant information and celebrate good news. The next stage is the KPI review. All the team claim the items on the list that they are responsible for and what progress they have made. Then a goal review is undertaken. This is to ensure that any tasks that are being progressed are in line with the company goals. Next is a to-do list review. Then issues and questions section. Then penultimately, this week’s to-do list is decided and assigned.
- The final task is for each team member rates the meeting to ensure its ongoing effectiveness. Five stars are awarded based on 1 star each for; Did the meeting start and finish on time? Was everyone relevant present? Agenda covered? Did the schedule keep to? Were there any unnecessary tangents or subject overruns?
BEST MOMENTS
‘We got to a point in our business a few years ago where all our meetings were just taking over, and I never felt like we got anything done in those meetings.’
‘Because there is a bit of a delay between them actually asking a question and getting them answered, they’ll often go and figure stuff out for themselves in the meantime.’
‘The idea is that this list of issues that you’ve got because everybody has been involved in creating, there is now buy-in with everybody who was in that meeting.’
‘What you end up doing is after that initial brainstorm, and maybe there are seventy things on that list, to begin with, you group them together, so you’ve got forty-odd, you choose the top five to seven, and there’s another ten that’s sort of connected, and everything else gets parked.’
‘We actually created a KPI for me. I have to be named and shamed if I have delays and overdue tasks in my inbox, which is great; it motivates me to do it.’
‘Everybody at the end goes round and gives their score. It then means we are being held accountable as a group to actually turn up on time, do what we promised we were going to do, stick to the agenda, make sure we actually cover the stuff on the issues list and move the business forward.’
VALUABLE RESOURCES
Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/SystemsAndOutsourcing/
Website: https://systemsandoutsourcing.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/drsteveday
The RIGHT Assistants For Your Business by Dr Steve Day http://bit.ly/sys-10
What are the other ways you do to not bore your team during company meetings? We would also love to hear your thoughts.
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