Running a Successful Staff Meeting

August 17, 2016 8:28 am

Regular staff meetings, team meetings or company get-togethers can be a little like herding cats. Getting all of your employees with different backgrounds and skill sets, and trying to keep them connected, productive and guided toward a common goal is no easy task. To help manage these different personalities and skills, the weekly or biweekly staff meeting is critical to obtaining your business goals. Here are a few tips on how to run a successful staff meeting.

  • Have Clear Objectives – There is nothing worse to team members than a meeting without a true purpose. A meeting must have a specific and defined purpose. In fact, meetings that have a written agenda tend to be more productive than meetings that do not. Standing meetings with vague purposes, such as “status updates,” are rarely a good use of time.
  • Be Conscious of Time – Create an agenda that lays out everything you plan to cover in the meeting, along with a timeline that allots a certain number of minutes to each item, and email it to people in advance. Once you’re in the meeting, put that agenda up on a screen or whiteboard for others to see. This keeps people focused. No one likes to be trapped in the never-ending meeting when they have work piling up on their desk. It is also important to start on time and end on time as well.
  • Ban Technology – Yes, we all live with our devices attached to us but that may be a bad thing in a staff meeting. Have one person keep notes but ask for the undivided attention of your team members during the meeting. This may mean banning smartphones and tablets during the meetings. If you don’t, you may find that your team members are emailing, surfing the web, or just playing around with their technology.
  • Follow Up – Sometimes staff meetings become black holes where the information is mentioned once and never followed up on. In addition, it’s quite common for people to come away from the same meeting with very different interpretations of what went on. To reduce this risk, email a memo highlighting what was accomplished to all who attended and how the suggestions and comments will be dealt with.

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