Team meetings are important for catching up with your co-workers regarding your group’s weekly or monthly accomplishments and challenges. It strengthens the communication between employees and designated leaders within the workplace. Being in charge of a team meeting can be daunting to some, especially for those who are doing it for the first time. The following tips can help you get on track and start organising amazing meetings!
1. Enumerate objectives to set the tone
Before starting a meeting, list down your agenda for the whole session. You can dedicate a slide to this at the beginning of your PowerPoint presentation or write in on the board. This gives the participants an idea of what to discuss and which topics are to be prioritised. Anything outside the list of objectives can either be discussed in another meeting or if there’s time left. Having a prepared list also helps everyone stay on track in means of topic and time.
Additionally, it’s better to have this agenda list crowdsourced beforehand: ask participating members in advance if they have core issues they want to share in the meeting that can be part of the objectives list. This way, you are giving them an everyone a fair chance of getting their voices heard.
2. Encourage participation
Always dedicate even just a small part of the meeting to hearing out everyone present in the room. Even quiet members can sometimes have great ideas and opinions to share. Keep a mindset of hosting meetings not just because you have something to say to everyone, but rather, making it a platform for everyone to be heard. You can also take the time to ask everyone about their weekend, share a piece of good news from their personal lives, or a short weekly update on their tasks. This can help liven up the meeting or serve as an icebreaker and help lighten up the mood.
3. Find solutions as a team
Though different tasks and challenges are delegated to each member, it’s important to also steer focus on working together to help each department lead or participating member who’s experiencing difficulty come up with action plans. Adopting this into practice further develops communication between employees and provides a fresh perspective in approaching different issues. It also builds a strong sense of camaraderie and increases the probability of having more successful interdepartmental collaborations.
4. Incorporate something new
Having weekly meetings can get monotonous especially when you keep following the same format. To spice things up, you can try adding something to break up the pattern: show a related Ted Talk, bring in snacks, ask everyone to dress the same colour or have the meeting at a different location. Introducing variety even in the smallest of ways can help make the meeting feel different every single time.
Mastering the art of leading an engaging meeting can be very tricky, but we hope that these steps will help turn your reporting into something your team members can look forward to every week.
