4 Steps To Create More Productive Meetings For Your Business
Years ago, I used to run a kitchen and bathroom manufacturing business.
Whenever I brought my team in for a meeting, I always had certain staff members who would hijack the meeting, others who never really stepped up or contributed, and some who quite obviously really didn’t want to be there. Meeting for me, back then, were pretty unproductive.
They were expensive too - meetings meant I had 15-20 people standing around yet still getting paid an hourly rate.
Maybe you can relate?
The thing is, meetings don’t have to be exercises in monotony and wasted energy.
In fact, running an effective meeting can be one of the most productive things you can do as a visionary and leader of your business. Because they allow everyone to come together and recalibrate your journey - is the business on track to reach its goals? Are your major projects running smoothly? Where do you need adjusting?
With that in mind, I want to share 4 steps for creating more productive meetings.
Step 1: Start with celebration
Rather than starting your meeting with numbers, boring updates, and the like, start your meeting by recognising the things you’re doing well.
At The Game Changers, we all share a ‘win’ at the beginning of each meeting. A win can be an excellent client result, a personal achievement, a recognition of excellence in others, or anything else they’d like to celebrate.
Starting meetings this way sets the tone, raises everyone’s energy and gets the whole team engaged.
Step 2: Have a clear and defined agenda
This is essentially a framework that you run through each week to make sure everyone stays on the same page.
Our agenda basically looks like this:
- Start with celebration - what are our wins for the week?
- KPIs - how are our critical numbers tracking?
- Staff movements - is anyone going away? How are their responsibilities being taken care of in their absence?
- Project tracking - every staff member works on their own growth project, as well as other projects within the business. We check in with everyone’s progress.
- Issues list - if any of the above are off track, we discuss solutions together.
- Actions - this stems from all of the above, particularly the issues list. We assign actions to each team member based on what’s needed to move forward, and give them a date that it needs to be resolved. These actions then become part of that staff member’s projects.
- Star charts - each team member gives a star to another member who has been living our cultural values.
Running our meetings like this has increased our productivity tenfold, as well as our staff engagement.
Step 3: Create a rhythm
Set a specific time every single week that you will meet as an organisation. If your workers are on different shifts, you may want to run 2 meetings a week. The point is for you to meet with your team on a regular basis - whatever that looks like for you.
Leadership is about leading your team, and organisations without clear leadership have disengaged staff, lack of alignment around goals, and poor productivity.
Make your weekly meetings an important time in your team’s mindset. If it’s important to you, it will become important to them.
Step 4: End with an alignment to culture
Your company’s culture is what drives your business and its staff. It’s the difference between having staff that clock in, do the absolute minimum, and clock out without giving a damn, to having an engaged team who strive to excel every single day.
So your company culture is pretty important - something that must be nourished and protected.
At The Game Changers, we always close the meeting with one word about how we are feeling, and then we rate the meeting. This allows us to check in with team members who aren’t feeling positive, and shows us where we need to improve, both individually and as a team.
How The Game Changers can help
If you’d like a template of our meeting agenda, just let us know by commenting on this blog, or just reach out to us on one of our social channels and ask for our ‘Winning the Week’ template.
If meetings have been unproductive for you, this template will absolutely help you structure your meetings in a way that fuels your business growth (instead of boring everyone to death!).
Likewise, if you have any questions about running effective meetings just get in touch. Running meetings is just part of the wider business coaching we provide in our Opulence program.
Opulence takes business owners from struggling and overworked to 3x growth and profits while getting back 10 hours a week within 6-12 months.
If you’re a business owner looking to scale and grow, please reach out. We’d love to have an honest conversation about your business and whether we can help you.
Click here to schedule a call with one of the team.
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