10 Ways to Make your Daily Team Meetings 10x Better

team work meeting

There’s nothing worse than a pointless meeting.

If you’re working hard to build your business, keep everyone on your team on track and create a fun and productive culture, focusing on optimizing your daily meetings will have an impact on your profits and more importantly, your employee happiness and productivity.

We’ve learned a lot in our startup when it comes to meetings.  After trial and error, we’ve now come to the conclusion that the keys to a productive morning meeting are these 10 factors:

1. Keep it Short.

All morning meetings now must be under 15 minutes.  This keeps everyone on point and also doesn’t mess up the flow of a well set morning schedule.

2. Stand up.

When you stand up, you think better, stay awake and feel more engaged.  Plus, we don’t have a circular table, so standing up keeps the team in the circle and makes communication easier.

3. Template the Sharing Style.

We’ve formulated how we share in our meetings, making it easy for everyone to make their points without worrying about how they have to say it.  One of our favorite templates is:  What was completed yesterday, 3 tasks for today, one thing we learned, one question for the group.  Having S.M.A.R.T. goals and data, or a KPI system of reporting in your office helps define the important data and keeps it relevant to the group you’re sharing with.  If your meeting is inter-departmental, it’s important to keep content relevant to what is relational to everyone in the meeting.  If data starts getting to detailed, you lose the attention of those that it doesn’t effect.

4. Keep a Consistent Start Time.

Start times are crucial for many reasons when you start consistently at the same time, you discourage stragglers, company calendars, and board room schedules need to be accurate to avoid frustration and when a meeting starts on time, it usually ends on time – weird how that works, but it does!

5. Change up the Speaking Order.

Keep things fresh for everyone there.  We’re creatures of habit but that means if we always do things the same way, we don’t stay as aware.  When you switch up the speaking order every day, it keeps everyone more alert, listening better and there’s less missed information.

6. Make it Playful.

Add some color, different snacks, music, random jokes or anything else to keep the energy in the room up.  Starting a meeting with fresh news or some laughter will up the energy in the entire room.  Again, we’re creatures of habit, switch up the habits, increase the awareness and engagement.

7. Open the Floor.

Meetings need to be very inviting to speak.  This is where you want to make sure your introverts and extroverts are given an even playing field.  Encourage speaking up and questions, this can be the most valuable part of the meeting.  If your team doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up, what’s the point of having a meeting?

8. Celebrate Successes.

Meetings are the perfect time to spread news and support wins.  Up the motivation for the day with a quick mention or some appreciation and that positive momentum can create hours of uplift for the team environment. This is the time of the meeting we like to share customer success stories. Make sure successes are celebrated as a team to promote your culture as a company and to help share your collective mission.

9. Create Direction.

There’s nothing worse than a meeting that goes off track.  We’ve all been at one where the meeting goes way off topic and becomes another meeting.  Appoint someone in your group to keep the direction of the meeting.  Give them full permission to speak up if there’s any sway off the set topic and time schedule.

10. End with Focus.

End your meeting on a mission.  The whole point of morning meetings is to get clarity and focus for the day.  Your team is meant to use the collaborative and accountability of the meeting to enhance their daily performance.  Make sure everyone is leaving the meeting with a clear outline of their day, tasks and responsibilities.

 

Put an end to boring, overtime morning meetings and take advantage of the huge benefits of a focused, positive team connection.  Daily meetings can add a lot to your bottom line if you take the time to build them right.

 

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