5 Tips to Make Weekly Meetings Useful for Your Whole Team

5 Tips to Make Weekly Meetings Useful for Your Whole Team

Team meetings are an excellent strategy to get everyone on the same page. It depends on how well you prepare the meetings, and whether you try to implement new things once in a while. Employees are often not interested in attending meetings if they know they will sit and listen to their manager for two hours without being included in the conversation. According to statistics, 55 million meetings happen each week in the US, and 71% of these meetings, people see as unnecessary.  

The main goal is to ensure effective communication to prevent your team from getting lost. Without regular weekly team meetings, employees can easily drift away from the company’s goals. The main goal is to accomplish a true team spirit because if you have a united team, you can offer good customer service, as well as generate quality leads and increase the company’s profit.

If you are looking for ideas on how to improve your weekly meetings, continue reading this post to find the necessary inspiration. 

Audit your weekly meetings

Auditing your meetings is an essential component of any successful business. Whether your team specializes in marketing, sales, customer service, or something else, it’s critical to audit your meetings. This form of audit requires a more hands-on approach rather than an automated one. The goal is to determine what works and what you can eliminate from the current meetings. 

Make sure you know the goal of each meeting; if you can make them shorter and if there is a possibility to eliminate some of those meetings. Once you settle this, think of ways to make the remainder of your meetings more effective and engaging. Make sure you come up with a few interesting staff meeting ideas to find those that you think will improve your meetings. Implement activities that allow you to improve employee enthusiasm. 

Distribute the meeting materials ahead of time

Don’t store documents and materials for the meeting; instead, send them to everyone ahead of time so they can fully understand the meeting’s goals. Sharing information ahead of time allows your team members more time to prepare, analyze, and organize their activities. You’ll get more insightful inputs, save time examining materials during meetings, and make more progress. 

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Let your team speak

Leadership is all about helping your team achieve their objectives and encouraging them to share their ideas and issues. Always aim for an open dialogue with your staff. So, plan interesting activities between meetings and communicate with your team members. Bring sweets, soft drinks, or new types of coffee, and try to engage with your staff by sharing some fun stories and asking about their personal interests. This way, they will feel more at ease addressing their difficulties and sharing ideas and creative solutions. Getting to know your team is an enlightening journey that you will definitely enjoy. 

Celebrate your team’s achievements

Before the weekly meeting, take the time to congratulate employees who closed a tough deal or who managed to solve a long-lasting project issue. Also, it is important to celebrate and acknowledge your team’s work when they hit a milestone. This demonstrates that you appreciate their dedication and professionalism. 

So, for example, if a team member exceeds their quarterly sales target, you can express your gratitude by giving out a gift card or simply a recognition and sharing it with the rest of the team. Also, let the awarded employees share their gratitude and show how much this moment means to them. This will boost everyone’s optimism for the meeting and inspire other team members to perform better.

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Let your employees set the topic for the next meeting

A good approach to accomplish this is to plan and organize your meetings ahead of time. A few days before the scheduled meeting, request that your team submit the topics they want to discuss. Assume you have a weekly kick-off meeting every Monday, and this gathering aims to prepare everyone for the upcoming week. In this case, your team may keep a running log of any queries or worries they have during that week. 

Also, before the meeting, encourage your team members to prepare an outline for the meeting using note-taking apps and share it with you. This way, everyone may contribute their ideas in the same spot. During the meeting, use this document as a roadmap to address your team’s topics, and their issues and work on solutions altogether. What matters most is that you give these sessions direction, regardless of how you format them. This allows your team to keep focused on the topics at hand while staying within the time constraints. 

Final thoughts

Being a team leader is frequently challenging but extremely rewarding. You may build an exceptional work environment that supports personal growth for your employees with a quality program and good communication. You and your staff will undoubtedly like such an environment because you all contributed to its creation. Ensure you give your employees much-needed credit for their performance and organize meetings where they have the lead role. Let them speak, and share their ideas and creativity.