In the sea of too-many meetings, a bad weekly team meeting is like a sinking ship. Why do we do this to ourselves every week? Why do we waste our time? Why are they so boring?
A bad weekly team meeting ends up leaving people feeling deflated and unenergised.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Weekly team meetings are a really powerful tool. As with many powerful tools, misused and misapplied it ends up being a waste of time.
How can you make your next team meeting more powerful, more inspiring and more energising?
Before diving in, it’s worthwhile taking a little step back and thinking about what purpose weekly team meetings serve. Weekly team meetings should be used for more complex and more interactive items. Too often however they are spent sharing information one-way. Boh-ring. Save that for e-mail or the million other tools out there that better serve that function.
Weekly team meetings should primarily be used for:
- Creating deeper connections with each other
- Collective brain-power & collaboration
- Connecting and aligning with the purpose and values
This means you can ditch a lot of your regular recurring standard agenda. It’s not inspiring. There may be some items which stay fixed, but you should leave a lot more room for fluid items. Below you’ll find four ways in which you can mix up your team meetings and keep them fresh. These jazzed up meetings will leave people feeling energised and inspired! And a bonus? All of these techniques work virtually or in-person.
Focus on Purpose & Values
Purpose is a huge motivator for people. Yet we spend so little time connecting the work we do with our purpose. Values are a really useful guiding light for decision making and behaviour, yet we spend so little time going ‘beyond the values on a wall’. Team meetings are a great opportunity to go deeper. A simple activity is to get your shiny purpose statement and values on a wall (physical or virtual) . Give everyone 4-5 minutes to individually jot down their thoughts to questions like the following:
- Which of our values do you think we’ve most faithfully lived in the last month?
- Which of our values do you think we’ve most struggled to live in the last month?
- What stories do you have about seeing our purpose and values in action?
- How closely do you feel the work you’ve been doing connects to our company purpose?
Then break people into pairs/small-groups to discuss further before coming together as an extended group to go through insights and takeaways.