Staff meetings are essential to running a company, irrespective of the number of employees.
While the frequency of the meetings might vary depending on various factors, it is imperative that you and your team become aware of the status quo, assess your position and build a possible strategy to execute for your team.
Staff meetings have become increasingly important in the modern workplace due to the shift to remote work, and it is probably the only time that members from different departments get to connect.
So here are the top things you can do to improve your staff meetings and some practices you are better off avoiding.
So let's jump in.
Things to do in Staff Meetings
Prepare a meeting agenda and share it so that people know what kind of meeting they are getting into and can come prepared for it.
Use a motivating tone during the meeting so that your employees do not feel demotivated during difficult parts of the meeting. Go for a confident, clear, and upbeat tone when communicating.
Identify and offer recognition whenever possible to keep your team members motivated and help them to push themselves to improve.
It would help if you held your team responsible when something went wrong, or things weren't where they needed to be. But at the same time, be courteous and empathetic so that they feel understood.
Encourage your team members to ask questions and participate in the staff meetings. It should not be a monologue. Instead, it has to be a conversation that all the members present contribute to.
Focus on solving problems instead of just focusing on listing them and not offering a way out. When people meet, it is an opportunity to analyze effectively and offer solutions to problems that are harder to solve in isolation.
Use a tool like Routine to take meeting notes and share them with your team afterward. Meeting notes make your meetings more effective and hold your teammates accountable.
Before, during, and after the meeting, assign POC status or tasks so that the meeting can be actionable. You can create in-meeting tasks just like in-notes on Routine.
Ask for regular feedback after meetings and ensure they are carefully considered for execution before the next. When feedback is acted upon, it motivates attendees to take the meetings more seriously.
Use a standard meeting format as much as possible. Standardization ensures that there are fewer ambiguities in the information provided and that most critical information regarding the meetings is clearly specified.
Keep track of critical decisions during the meeting and ensure attendees have access to this list. This helps in holding all parties involved accountable.
Rotate roles of note-taker and facilitator for different meetings since it can sometimes get monotonous. Rotation pushes more people to take up responsibilities running meetings.
Things to avoid during staff meetings
Filling time is a strict no-no during staff meetings. The last thing the attendees have to feel is their time being wasted on small talk that no one benefits from.
When you conduct a meeting, the least that is expected is that you start it on time. Starting a staff meeting late gives an impression that you don't care about the attendees' time.
Do not multi-task while the meeting is happening. When people in the room have dedicated this time and attention to the activity, it is not fair for you or others in the meeting to multi-task on something else.
Stop penalizing attendees for participation and failure. Actively encourage participation and remove any stigma around failure to see the attendees develop solutions more freely.
Try to divide your attention among all attendees and not just focus on a few of them, which can lead to a less-than-optimal output.
Do not attend a meeting unprepared, especially if you are the organizer. You don't need to know everything; things slip your attention all the time, but a basic level of familiarity is expected from someone who came up with the meeting in the first place. (How to become an effective meeting organiser)
Don't discuss things that could have been covered over asynchronous communication channels like email or chat. Meeting time is precious and use it only for items that demand it. Please don't make it a status update session; an email would have sufficed.
Don't interrupt others participants unnecessarily when they are making a point. Either build a mechanism to jump in politely or wait for the other person to finish and then make your point.
Don't go off on a tangent and divert far from the topic at hand. Not only are you wasting precious time, but you are also breaking the flow of the conversation, and you might end up derailing the entire meeting.
Conclusion
And with that, we end this blog post about staff meetings' dos' and donts.' If you like content like this, consider checking us out on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thanks for reading.
