In order for your business to succeed…

Employee activity must closely align with the goals of owners and leaders. How do you accomplish this? You run effective team meetings that keep your team in the loop – preferably every week. Great businesses have a consistent rhythm of effective team meetings.

These meetings also quickly and effectively foster a culture of continuous development and fun as your team expands.

However, one problem tends to plague effective team meeting systems – most of your employees have dealt with pointless, boring, and ineffective meetings in the past! You’ve probably been there too in either your ownership or corporate experience, thinking things like: “This could’ve been an email!”

Ready to conduct a wonderful meeting every week while saving time? Follow these guidelines and tips.

The Structure

Every great meeting has a structure that the team can know, remember, and prepare for. The structure should look like this:

  • Consistent time
  • Consistent frequency
  • Consistent topics (relevant to everyone)
  • Same person facilitating
  • Zero or very little deviation from the agenda

Now, this all sounds quite boring – and you thought we would spice things up? Not yet. This consistent structure will actually contribute to a meeting that packs a punch. When your entire team has clear expectations about the meeting structure, they will feel way more prepared and empowered to contribute powerful ideas and point out new opportunities for your business.

Imagine a meeting with zero rambling or deviating from the topics that drive your business forward. Start with structure.

The Agenda

You have written goals for your business because writing it down makes the goal real. A crisp, specific agenda makes your meeting real and ensures you address every point that needs to be addressed.

When it comes to preparing a meeting agenda, time management is crucial. Make sure you allot a particular amount of time to each agenda item. Consider the meeting’s ultimate goal and which agenda items, based on talks, brainstorming, and feedback from various team members, may take more time than others. The most critical agenda items usually take up the most time, so place those as early as possible in the meeting.

By assigning time slots to your meeting agenda, you hold yourself and your team accountable to be productive and on time so that you can complete all of the tasks that were originally scheduled.

Finally, the agenda provides a wonderful framework for you and your team to take notes and make important choices. Your team can keep track of notes related to each agenda item by writing them under each item. This will (hopefully) save their butts when they inevitably forget something you told them!

Action Items

You organize these meetings to create action plans – plans of attack.

Therefore, your meeting agenda needs to include a place for action items. That way, in the next meeting, the facilitator can go through critical action items from the last meeting and keep track of progress.

As new action items emerge from the present meeting, you may add them to the existing action items in this fashion.

It’s critical that you assign each action item to a specific individual and give them a date so that you can keep each other accountable. This also gives everyone a mechanism to communicate progress updates at each meeting.

Bonus: Rate the Meeting

Even with these systems in place, you may never have a perfect meeting. The best way to improve is to solicit objective feedback from your team. Have them rate the meeting on scale of 1 to 5 and let them justify the rating.

No meeting will ever be pointless if you focus on these components. Imagine a business where every team member gladly rated your meetings a “5”!

Coaching will unlock a plethora of new team-building and leadership opportunities for your business, leading to massive growth both on and off the balance sheet. Ready to begin your coaching journey? Reach out to a coach or request more information here.

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