If you’re wondering how you can conduct a great meeting to inspire and engage your team and produce real results then you’ll enjoy these four simple steps for running a more effective team meeting.
1. Give the Meeting a Purpose
The most important thing is that he meeting needs to have a purpose. Ask yourself why you’re holding a meeting. Are you holding the meeting because it’s that time of the week/month, or is there a real purpose for bringing everyone together and locking them away from the world?
Meetings can be used to achieve an awful lot if done properly. They can be used to get everyone caught up on what is happening and how things are progressing. They can be used to get a gauge on how everyone is moving and if there are any problems. You can also use a conference room scheduler to further reinforce the mission statement and bring everyone back to working on team goals.
These team goals need to be the center of your team meeting. So if the team goal is to increase sales then the meeting should be about how you can do this.
2. There Needs to be an Agenda
If your meeting has a purpose then it must also have an agenda. An agenda is a list of topics that are to be discussed at the meeting. The agenda will give you a good idea of how much time you can dedicate to each item on it, as time is a precious resource in a team meeting. If you want to get the most out of it, then use a meeting scheduling software.
Team meetings must start on to time and end on time too. If there is something of importance on the agenda and it needs longer then you can carry it over the next meeting or arrange for another meeting with the key people related to that item.
You should also hold regular meetings. This can be very Monday (which is an ideal time for planning for the week ahead), or every day. What matters is that you hold them when you say you will and you encourage participants to be punctual.
When you randomly call meetings or postpone them it tells your team that you don’t respect them or their time.
3. Encourage Attendees to Participate
If what you want to discuss in the meeting is relevant to the people there (and they shouldn’t be there if it isn’t), then you need to get them to participate in the discussion and be a part of the decision-making process.
This can be achieved by going around the table and getting the input of everyone present. You could also consider changing up the roles so everyone isn’t always listening to you. Let someone else have the chair and lead the discussion if they want to.
When you encourage people to participate in meetings they become enthusiastic about them and believe that the meetings really achieve something. They begin to care more about meetings and will endeavor to turn up on time and become part of the discussion.
4. Write Down Minutes
Every meeting needs someone who is there to take down the minutes of the meeting. It helps to make it a different person each time. Minutes are the record of what was discussed and what everyone agreed on during the meeting and they can be used to put together the agenda for the next meeting.
A copy of these minutes needs to be shared and made accessible to anyone who was present at the meeting. This way everyone has a reminder of what was discussed and it gets people who were assigned tasks during the meeting to begin working on them before the next one. We personally use Asana to track all of our meetings.
