How Can You Hold Effective Staff Meetings?


Many people believe that they conduct effective meetings, when all they really do is host a party filled with official sounding chit chat. Or worse, they deliver a monologue that bores everyone. Either way, what happens is that their meetings produce little.

How exactly can you hold a short, effective staff meeting?

Here's the general thing. Keep them short. Most staff meetings should last less than an hour. You don't want your staff sitting in meetings but rather, you want your staff to spend their time working on things that earn money for your business. Keep them positive. Negative meetings contain insults, ridicule, and attacks. In these activities, caution and resentment are created in which it always costs your company money. Are you keeping them interactive? Remember that there are intelligent people in your staff. By putting them to work in your meetings, you can advance the effectiveness of your organization.

Try sharing news. You can give the members of your group one minute to report on progress made in their area of responsibility. You will discover that this results in bullet point reports of essential information. Preventing people from philosophizing, explaining, justifying, criticizing, and engaging in other unproductive activities is another thing this method will do. What you can do is plan a time budget of 8 to 10 minutes.

Teach something. Inviting a guest expert to give a 10 minute presentation on some skill or technology that benefits your group is a good idea. Tell the expert that you want a logical explanation of practical ideas. Another thing you can do is ask members of your group to take turns delivering brief tutorials on topics that benefit the others. Try to plan a time budget of 10 to 15 minutes.

Practice skills. Create team learning activities that sharpen or teach skills needed in your business. For example, you could role play job skills (especially useful for sales teams), solve puzzles (useful for high tech groups), or take quizzes (useful for everyone). How about asking group members to take turns in bringing an activity that reviews or teaches a valuable skill. A brief recap of key ideas should be followed by this activity. Afterwards, try asking the group members to give a fifteen second report on how these ideas can be applied to improve their work. Plan a time budget: 10 to 20 minutes.

Solve problems. Be sure that you give each group a minute to describe a challenge that hinders work on a current project and then let everyone propose solutions. Suggestions should be brief and free of self aggrandizing explanations or motivational sermons. In order to succeed, this process will also require a positive and supportive environment. People will then be reluctant to reveal issues that need attention if this is used to ridicule, insult, or criticize the individual. Plan a time budget: 3 to 6 minutes per person.

Try using a facilitator. A facilitator will help you conduct meetings where the results matter. Doing this would mean that you can participate instead of just spending your time managing the meeting. A good facilitator will know group decision making processes that move your meeting toward results everyone supports.

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