Have Your Best Staff Meeting Ever
- Tell me a little more about how you reached the leadership position you’re in today and what your current role looks like.
I have always been a writer — my degree is in English and when given the opportunity I write with a voracious appetite, but I never really expected it to be a truly viable career opportunity. After all, I had a variety of skills applicable in the workplace and I was certain they would help me find a satisfying career. I worked for several nonprofits and found my skills always led me more toward office management and, to be honest, I always thrived in this role. A few years later, I got married, had my son and moved several states away, forcing me to start from square one — which is exactly what I did. I went back to the very first thing I loved and I became a writer. I worked freelance for a while and eventually landed with a marketing company in need of a content writer. Just as happened before, I found myself slipping into an organization role — and within three years I went from writing content to managing operations. Now as the COO I handle everything about the day to day operation of my company, Social Eyes Marketing. I manage both the creative and the development team and truly thrive at being the sort of “translator” that takes my clients’ dream through the creative and technical process to bring them to reality. As much as I love writing and being creative, I get the greatest joy in finding new ways to keep my team engaged and encouraging them to always push things to the next level.
- Could you share a memory or example of a badly run meeting that you attended? What made it so frustrating or inefficient?
Everyone has been to one of those marathon meetings that just doesn’t seem to end and that can sometimes be, well almost always is, the fault of the meeting leader. I was at a staff meeting in a previous position, and we began with an introduction of each staff member — even though we already all worked together. Our boss asked us to share our biggest fear, which degraded into a 30-minute conversation on things that made everyone uncomfortable — worst yet we were half an hour in and we hadn’t even discussed any business yet. Once we got to business, we went over every project as a full team, even though this resulted in most of us being in on parts of the meeting we had no need to be included in. I could look around the room and see other staff members getting impatient — we were all busy and wasting our time listening about people’s fears and projects we weren't even involved in was a major source of frustration. The meeting was also poorly timed, after it drug on for almost two hours there were only 30 minutes left in most people’s day, meaning they didn’t get back to work and implement anything that was discussed, they simply began their pack up procedures and headed home. By the next day, most of the points in the meeting are just scratches on a notepad and a faint memory.
- In your opinion, what’s the value of meetings, anyway? In our era of email, Slack and messaging apps, why do we still need to interrupt everyone’s day with actual meetings?
Before I took over as COO, we never had regular staff meetings. We communicated almost exclusively via email and messaging. Once we had a project management system in place it felt like things just sort operated themselves and that a meeting would be a waste of time. However, what we realized is that a divide was being created between two sides of our team — the creative and the technical — and the continuity of how everything worked together was getting lost in the minutia of the project management system. We needed the teams to come together on a personal level so that the technical side could understand the creative side and vice versa.
We are also all extremely busy, and meetings can seem like a drain on our time, but when meetings are made to encourage and inspire — and they don’t take too long — the effect they have on productivity far outweighs the time they take.
- What are your 3–5 ingredients for running an exceptionally productive meeting?
- Keep it Brief
Staff meetings should never be longer than an hour, challenge yourself to see if you can cut down on the chatter and get your meetings more efficient.
2. Focus on Action — Not Whys and Hows
People can really get into their heads during meetings. It’s great to theorize but to figure out whys and hows, you need to do research, not conjecture, so keep these conversations out of your meeting. Focus on problems and actions to solve them. Meetings are about giving people the important information they need to implement and move forward, give them what they need.
3. Alternate the Meeting Leadership Roles Among Staff Members
Some people love to hear themselves talk, some prefer to never say a word, so how do you bridge the gap between these two personality types so that everyone gets something they need out of your staff meeting? We rotate the leadership duties of the meeting among staff members. Each staff member is instructed to start the meeting with a 5-minute training on their area of expertise. This infuses them with confidence, gives them an opportunity to speak and helps everyone understand the details of the big picture, rather than just the small picture of their own job duties.
4. Have an Agenda and Use a Time Slide
It really is important to have an agenda, so the staff member who is leading that week will ask the employees if there is anything that they need to discuss at the meeting via email. This gives everyone on the team a chance to say what they need to say every meeting, so they don’t end up trying to fight the floor later on. We also set up a timed slide show to accompany our meetings — you could get the same effect with a timer. This alerts us to when we should be moving on to the next topic, without it feeling pushy. If the conversation needs to continue further past the allotted time, we table the discussion and have a sprint meeting to discuss it with key personnel later.
5. Be Inspiring
As important as it is to be brief and stick to business, inspiring your staff is the number one benefit of having regular meetings. Use it as an opportunity to share a helpful tip, kudos for jobs well done, or a great credo to encourage and inspire. People generally always talk about the problems in meetings, not the highlights and wins they experience. If time allows at the end of the meeting I will ask the staff members to share their best work moment of the week. When we go over these “Weekly Wins” together it allows the staff to see their hard work in action and walk away from the meeting feeling accomplished.
- What does a meeting look/feel like when you’ve really nailed it? How can you tell when a meeting is going really well
Smiles are the true hallmark of a successful meeting. Of course, it always feels good when the ideas are flowing and business is getting done, but there is so much more to an effective meeting. When people walk away chatting, smiling and laughing I always feel as though we succeeded. Meetings are about business, but they are also about relationships, work experience, and company culture. We may not solve all the problems for our clients within our staff meeting, but if we come out as a stronger team and truly make connections it becomes apparent in the quality of work — and the clients reap the benefits.