Without a clear weekly team meeting agenda, meetings can be pointless and unproductive. Here are some handy tips for conducting successful meetings.
Meetings are critical to the success of any organization.
But why?
They help teams share important information, address action items and roadblocks, improve accountability, boost morale, and increase employee engagement.
However, without a clear weekly team meeting agenda, conducting effective weekly meetings can be a challenge.
In this article, you’re going to learn how to conduct team meetings well with a weekly team meeting agenda.
Let’s get started.
To conduct a successful weekly staff meeting, you must develop a clear team meeting agenda like this one:
Image via Meeting Booster
Why?
Having a clear agenda gives your meetings a clear purpose and direction. This enables you to host productive meetings.
As a result, you avoid conducting unproductive/ineffective meetings that can be detrimental to the long-term success of your organization.
Remember that unproductive meetings are not only a waste of time but they can affect your employees or freelancers productivity and eat up your organization’s budget.
In fact, research shows that ineffective meetings cause U.S. businesses to lose $37 billion per year.
Meetings with a clear purpose invite more participation and team collaboration. This way, you can manage your expenses better as your meetings will be more effective.
So, before you conduct any meeting, have a well-planned weekly team meeting agenda that clearly outlines its purpose and objectives.
Before the meeting starts, determine what you want to accomplish. Write down the goals of your meeting and the topics the team will discuss during the meeting.
Here’s how to create a clear weekly team meeting agenda:
Not sure how to create a weekly team meeting agenda?
Use these meeting agenda templates on the internet and start customizing them for your business.
In today's pandemic-driven shift to remote working culture, your team members will rarely work from one location.
According to a 2022 State of Remote Work survey report by Buffer, 49% of employees say they operate under a fully remote work structure:
Image via Buffer
What does this mean?
Most likely, your team may consist of members who work remotely from places other than your office.
Thus, scheduling virtual meetings can help to ensure your remote workers stay aligned with other team members.
While Zoom seems to be the go-to platform for virtual meetings, there are plenty of advanced alternatives available today. This Attrock post reviews 32 of the top video conferencing platforms you could consider.
This will make your meetings more engaging for every participant.
Better yet, you can have a digital whiteboard to write down notes during the meeting or invite team members to brainstorm ideas in real-time.
Even with a clear weekly team meeting agenda, if you don’t appoint a facilitator, your meetings will not be effective.
Someone must lead the meeting.
Identify a meeting facilitator who can keep every participant focused on discussing the topics of the meeting.
The facilitator should also guide the meeting by encouraging team members to participate actively.
What’s more?
The facilitator must write down action items during the meeting to ensure everything the team has agreed on doesn’t get lost or forgotten.
A good rule of thumb is to also appoint someone to take notes during each week's meeting. The person you appoint should create the meeting minutes and write down any action items that come up during the discussions.
This will help you know where to begin in your next meeting.
To ensure every participant understands what the meeting will be all about, it’s important to ask team members to submit topics before the scheduled meeting. Whether it’s presentation videos or just plain topics, it helps to know things beforehand.
For instance, if you have a weekly meeting every Monday that’s meant to help members prepare collectively for the week ahead, your team could submit any questions or concerns they have about the coming week in a document.
You can then use this document to guide your discussions as you work toward addressing the questions or concerns raised by team members.
Pro tip: For best results, you can use a note-taking tool like Evernote to list down topics submitted by members and then share it with all the participants before the meeting resumes. This will enable participants to add their ideas to the same document.
Even though weekly team meetings are vital, you don’t have to invite everyone to each weekly meeting you conduct.
To hold fruitful meetings, you need to have the “less is more” idea in mind when creating the weekly team meeting agenda.
Remember that having a larger group of participants can lead to a drop in productivity.
Instead, here are a few tips to help you invite only the required participants:
The topics to be discussed can help you determine who needs (or who doesn’t need) to attend the meeting.
Give the other members who don’t need to be in attendance the option to join if they wish. This way, no one will feel locked out of the meeting. At the same time, worker productivity won’t take a hit.
Setting a fixed day, time, and meeting space that’s suitable for every attendee can be challenging but it’s a great idea if you want to conduct successful weekly meetings.
It enables team members to know what to expect each week and come prepared.
What’s more?
It also saves everyone’s time.
It’s also a good idea to involve everyone when setting the day, time, and venue of the meeting since every participant has their preferences.
In your weekly team meeting agenda, ensure you state the time the duration of the meeting and stick to it.
For instance, if you schedule the meeting for 45 minutes, you shouldn’t extend the meeting to 50 minutes.
If your weekly meetings go past the allotted time, you risk hampering your team’s productivity as they’ll have lesser time to dedicate to other tasks.
If you feel that you have a lot of topics to discuss and don’t have enough time, consider prioritizing what’s most important. You can always schedule undiscussed agenda items for the coming week’s meeting.
You can also schedule another meeting and invite only affected team members to discuss agenda items that can’t wait until the next meeting.
Ensure you observe the time zones of your remote employees so that you don’t conduct meetings when they are asleep.
Even if you appoint a facilitator to run your meetings, they shouldn’t be the ones to run all the meetings every time. You also don’t have to facilitate every meeting.
Having the same person to facilitate the meeting every week might make it stale.
Rotate who facilitates the meeting to keep participants engaged and interested. This also makes the meeting lively.
For instance, you can allow your remote teams to facilitate the meeting in one week and your on-site teams in the next week’s meeting — and the cycle continues.
There is no foolproof way to conduct fruitful weekly staff meetings. However, having a clear weekly team meeting agenda can help you give your meetings a clear purpose and direction.
Use these handy tips to hold more efficient weekly staff meetings.
Without proper preparation, meetings can be a waste of time and energy. Use this meeting preparation checklist for productive and efficient meetingst.
Learn how to plan meetings that are productive, efficient, and highly successful. Click now to take your meeting planning skills to the next level.
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