5 Things to Cover on Weekly Team Meetings

Team meetings are often scorn as “a useless waste of time” or “this could have been an email”, but the truth is that a productive meeting is an important part of keeping a team functioning and motivated. After all, if you aren’t communicating with your team, they can quickly get into a rut of just going through the paces while not producing. So, you need some meetings otherwise you end up with a lack of communication. The trick, of course, is to cover relevant information and minimize the number of meetings for any week. Unless there’s an emergency or sudden mission-critical event, you should be able to fit everything you need to discuss into a one-hour-a-week meeting with everything else being communicated by email.

The 5 most important things to cover in team meetings, in order, are:

1. Statistics – teams should be able to see the statistics related to their position. Team members should be responsible for their stats and the manager should assist with improving stats for workers with issues.
2. Programs and Targets – regardless of the size of the team, the manager should have objectives handed down to show what should happen for that team for the quarter/ month/ week with targets assigned as required to ensure those objectives are met or exceeded.
3. Problems and Solutions – there are always issues that appear and these problems/ disagreements should be addressed in the weekly meeting. Problems should only be brought up if there is a solution presented as well to avoid creating a “gripe-fest”.
4. General Announcements – used to announce birthdays and other personal fun things. Also used to inform of other items in other parts of the company.
5. Wins – Have everyone bring a personal win, a success story, or a customer testimonial to end the meeting on a high. It also improves morale and talks about how members that are not customer facing can hear about the good brought upon by the company.

Conclusion

Just like this post, a good meeting is short and concise. And while most of this list could be handled as an email, the Problems and Solutions line is often best solved in a meeting format so that any issues can be actioned in the most efficient manner with responsibilities and planned courses of action discussed between the relevant teams.