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Your weekly staff meeting should drive team accountability and engage your department to focus on working on solutions rather than spending the time giving status updates. Avoid being blindsided by missed priorities and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs-the most valuable metrics that drive your company's overall growth) by using your team's collective intelligence to make critical adjustments during the quarter to achieve success and have a little fun along the way. If every meeting feels like a formal meeting (like a board meeting), it might make it extremely difficult to have effective staff meetings as the environment might not be as collaborative if it doesn't align with your company culture. The team meeting format will go a long way in developing a high-performance culture.
Weekly team meetings are a key part of an overall strategic meeting rhythm that helps grow a company toward excellence and is important in executing your 90-day execution-ready quarterly plan and its quarterly rocks. Your strategic annual plan is important, but the degree to which you can up the ante on the output of your Weekly Staff Meetings is the degree to which you can build a great organization. The great thing about Rhythm's patented software is that it creates weekly meeting agendas for every person (and team) tied directly to the company's growth initiatives. This keeps your entire organization on track and increases your Return on Payroll each and every week, no matter how many time zones your remote team covers. The key to running the meeting is an effective weekly meeting is to have the right weekly team meeting agenda (click here for a monthly meeting).
Keep your remote employees aligned and engaged, even when they are working from home.
As more and more workers are asked to work from home, we often get asked for our favorite tips and tricks to keep the entire virtual team engaged. Here are some of our favorite tips when using video conferencing software, such as Zoom or WebEx, for your team meetings. These are just some of the highlights to get you started.
Have all attendees turn on their video on their laptops, even if they are all in the same room. This is preferred to the single-camera view for the entire conference room so that remote attendees can see the faces and expressions of their co-workers to help better understand non-verbal communication.
Create a set of ground rules that work for your organization.
Always introduce yourself when entering the meeting
Use mute when you aren't speaking to minimize disruptions
Have your cell phones on silentAlways be present, don't allow for multitasking
Ask your team what rules that they want to adhere to for your meetings
Appoint someone to facilitate the meeting’s raised hand functions, create individual breakout rooms, run polls, etc. This is often best served by someone not facilitating the meeting. That way one person can concentrate on the content while the other keeps an eye on your video conferencing software's chat and hand-raising features.
The video must be turned on for all participants, it needs to be the new normal. Once the team understands that video is a requirement, they will dress business appropriately and have a clean background. Some services also allow for a virtual background so that you can focus on the participant.
The "Brady Bunch" view, or the gallery view, should be the default view for your meetings. This view lets you see everyone in the meeting, not just the person speaking. This helps the team feel more like a team and allows them to read each participant's facial expressions better.
Keep people on track by keeping the team focused on the task at hand. Some customers like to use a timer, and others like to self-police. Choose what works best for your organization to limit time-wasting tangents.
Call on people to ensure that you get participation from all team members. The people who don't speak up in typical meetings might need even more assistance during a virtual weekly meeting.
See how the Rhythm Strategy Execution Software fixes weekly meetings by automatically creating the weekly staff meeting agenda tied directly to your strategic initiatives.
Make them powerful problem solving and brainstorming meetings.
There is so much power in what you choose to call this weekly staff meeting. What you call it sets the tone and expectations of everyone that’s coming. If you don’t do anything else, at least change the name of your staff meeting to a Weekly Adjustment Meeting to highlight the change in expectations from the meeting and give your staff a fresh start. You don’t need “death by status” meeting anymore. You need to discuss solutions and make the necessary and often critical adjustments in your execution so that you can achieve the strategic objectives of your organization. The purpose of the staff meeting is sharing information and brainstorming on solutions to your challenges. Make sure that you publish the meeting schedule weeks in advance so that all members can attend.
The chart, from the book Rhythm by our CEO Patrick Thean, is showing you a bold comparison between a status meeting and an adjustment meeting. Visit our comprehensive weekly team meeting resource center for more tools and information. See how Rhythm Systems helps you fix your weekly team meeting with the right weekly meeting agenda template. This will take some time for the staff to get used to, but the investment will pay off in the long run as employee engagement will drastically increase. If you want to create a problem solving meeting, read that blog article.
Each team member should come prepared each and every week
Good preparation is key to spending most of your meeting on Adjustments rather than Status. You need to be able to identify your victories, determine what you're accountable for, talk about anything that has you stuck, and plan for a successful week with your team meeting agendas.
Every team member should hold themselves accountable to be prepared for each and every weekly staff meeting. They should read all of the reports submitted, gather all data required for the team, and be ready to discuss the most important issues facing your department and organization. Read this excellent article to learn how to build accountable leaders and teams.
Refer to the Meeting with Myself Tool to learn the proper agenda to prepare for a team meeting. Ensure that the team commits to this standard process for preparation. There are 4 easy steps to fixing your weekly team meeting and putting in a little effort pays big dividends each and every week. As an example, it will take some time to implement a new process at work, why not work on it every week?
Rotate to keep everyone experienced.
Someone must run the meeting and that job goes to the staff meeting facilitator should keep everyone focused on discussing solutions and necessary adjustments, so you don't get bogged down in status updates. Use a "Parking Lot" to capture ideas for later discussion and keep the meeting from getting off track allowing you to discuss all of the agenda items in the allotted meeting time. The team always appreciates starting on time, the purpose of the meeting, a productive meeting, action items being recorded, and ending on time
They should guide the discussion by asking the team how to move struggling priorities forward. The facilitator should record action items during the meeting to capture anything the team has agreed to do so those don’t get lost. It is especially important to capture good notes on the specific adjustments your team commits to making to get back on track.
Also, make sure that you assign a note taker each and every week. This person will be responsible for creating the meeting minutes and recording any action items that arise out of the discussions. The action items from the previous week should be discussed at the next meeting to ensure team accountability and progress towards your strategic initiatives.
Use this agenda week after week.
It isn’t just about having an agenda but the correct weekly staff meeting agenda. One of the biggest mistakes that cause bad meetings is the lack of an agenda or getting it two minutes before the meeting. The agenda should be sent well ahead of time and cover all the areas the company needs to discuss to grow its business. If you need some staff meeting agenda ideas, you'll find our weekly staff meeting template below, which you can adjust to fit your team's needs.
The team meeting agenda should include all the steps you need to take when getting together with your team, whether in a formal or informal setting. Ensure that the mood fits your company culture and that everyone knows they are coming to the meeting expecting to do work and solve problems. Ensure you have time for the staff to add an agenda topic they must work on with the team. Please watch yourself to ensure that project management tasks stay within your meeting agenda, which includes examples for staff meetings or any important recurring meeting.
Establishing the right meeting rhythms with your executive team is key.
Many executive leadership teams spend several hours per week in meetings together. When you consider the salaries and the many other demands on their time, you want to ensure you have effective weekly meetings every week! The only way you'll reach your Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is to have the perfect Rhythm of meetings.
Make sure you establish a habit of doing everything possible to only having meetings that add value and a clear meeting objective. Keep them future-focused, and do not give status updates; that is the past. Have discussions that lead you to make the necessary adjustments to achieve the company plan. Now that you have a staff meeting agenda template, make sure you use it and stay focused!
One of the best ways to increase the effectiveness of your meetings is to appoint a great weekly team meeting facilitator. A great meeting facilitator will help you make sure that every voice gets heard, that action items are captured and that the meeting stays on track following the agenda and kimit the amount of time spent off track. You can learn new facilitation skills with our free weekly meeting facilitation guide: 3 Steps to Ensure Your Meeting Will Be A Success.
Learn how our software can help you team execute better weekly meetings.
Start Running More Effective Weekly Meetings
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How to spend 80% of your time in your weekly meetings solving problems and making adjustments to your plan
How to prepare for your weekly meeting
The weekly meeting agenda that allows you to focus on the work that matters
What an effective weekly meeting dashboard looks like
Special considerations for Executive Team weekly meetings
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We appreciate you taking time to read the guide. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at products@rhythmsystems.com. Happy Planning!
Schedule a demo or find out more from our Senior Product Specialists
Check out our blog resource written by strategy execution experts.
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