3 Types of Team Meetings That Will Gain Trust & Raise Engagement

Never Have a Boring Team Meeting Again

Many meetings are a waste of time. People turn up unprepared, there is no agenda, and half the attendees are looking at their phones.

But effective meetings with a purpose are useful, especially when you use them for team building.

Productive meetings can do wonders for team engagement, building trust, and raising productivity.

Why?

Because engagement, trust, and discretionary effort go up when a leader takes the time to communicate and interact with the team.

Meetings are your prime opportunity to do this.

There are three types of meetings you can use to engage the team:

• Strategy meetings
• Team meetings
• One-to-one meetings

In all these meetings, demonstrating care and concern for your team is important. Do this by asking about workload, resources, required training, and roadblocks.

If you focus on helping your team achieve their goals and providing support, these meetings are well worth the effort.

Here are the three types of meetings you should be holding regularly with your team:

Strategy Meetings

People like to be up-to-date with company news; strategy meetings are a great place to do this.

Organizations talk about ‘being one big team’ and ‘going the extra mile’, but sometimes the reciprocal courtesy of communicating progress around company KPIs is omitted.

There’s even a word for not communicating to the employees on the ground — mushroom management.

“I’m just a mushroom. Kept in the dark and fed on sh*t.”

If you hold a team strategy meeting every three to six months, you can update the team, answer questions, and avoid turning your team into mushrooms.

An overview of what’s happening at senior leadership level makes your team feel included and valued.

The break room comments from colleagues whose managers hoard information aren’t flattering. People like to be in the know.

Once you’ve covered the high-level update, it’s time to discuss team strategy. If organizational KPIs have changed, team KPIs might have, too.

• Ask for ideas for changes or improvements.
• Check that team KPIs are relevant and on-track
• Check if the workload is acceptable
• Ask the team if they need more time, equipment, access to people or information
• Check if the right people are doing the right tasks

If you are worried about the time cost of the strategy meeting, swap out one of your team meetings.

Action point: Book your next three strategy meetings into your calendar.

Benefits of holding strategy meetings:

• Your team is up-to-date on the high-level functioning of the organization
• You get to do a periodic review of team goals and leverage the expertise of the whole team
• Communicating and asking for ideas and input increases engagement
• Your team won’t be mushrooms

Team Meetings

Most of us are used to dull team meetings where we take turns talk about what we are doing.

These sorts of meetings don’t achieve much and don’t have a purpose. If you have a team meeting every week, that wastes a lot of time.

“You should never go to a meeting or make a telephone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.” — Steve Jobs

Instead of the ‘round robin’ type of meeting, try out some of these ideas:

Team development:

• Team members take turns to run a session on their area of expertise
• Team members take turns to run a session on industry updates
• Guest speakers from other teams give a training session
• Senior leaders come and talk about what their departments do
• The team discusses the development and training they need to achieve their goals
• Team members provide an overview of any training courses they have attended
• Senior leaders come and talk about their career path and why they do what they do
• Team members talk about their career aspirations or past experiences in other industries
• Team members teach a non-work related skill

Team engagement

Use your team meeting to deliver an Above & Below the Line session or do a quick engagement survey to improve team engagement.

Above and Below the line session:

Draw a horizontal line across a whiteboard, ask the team to describe behaviors they want to see in the team and write the answers above the line.

Ask the team what behaviors they don’t want to see and write those below the line.

Get consensus on only behaving in an ‘Above the Line’ way.

NB: Check out the full article on Above & Below the Line

Quick engagement survey:

Draw a horizontal line on the whiteboard and put the number one at one end and ten at the other. The one represents disengaged, and the ten, engaged.

Hand out some slips of paper and ask the team to write down how engaged they are out of ten.

To ensure anonymity, use the same pens for everyone and get someone else to collect the folded slips. Ask another person to put the scores on the line.

The results give an overview of team engagement, albeit a rough one. You can then decide on how to address any issues.

NB: Check out the full article on how to do a quick team engagement survey here.

Q&A Sessions

In times of change, your team will want to know what’s happening, and you can use the team meeting as a Q&A session.

Topics the team may want to discuss could be:

• Organizational restructures
• Pay freezes
• Hire freezes
• Recent redundancies
• Department mergers
• Organizational takeovers
• Rumors
• Negative press

Being transparent about possible department restructures and negative news will go a long way to building trust in tough times.

You may not be able to share everything with your team, but if you are proactive in sharing what you can divulge, it will help your team.

Team building activities

If you want to deliver an exciting meeting, making it interactive will help.

There are many team-building activities, as you’ll know if you’ve ever played with Lego bricks, plasticine, or sticks and marshmallows at work.

Here are some I sourced online with a quick five-minute search:

• 10 Team Building Activities for Small Groups
• 50 Awesome team building activities for work
• Lego team building activities

Check out the activities that will appeal to your team and get team building!

Social events:

All work and no play make Jack and Jackie very dull colleagues.

Yes, must get the work done, but there’s nothing wrong with rewarding the team with a break now and again.

Use the team meeting for:

• Celebrating team achievements
• Celebrating birthdays and work anniversary’s
• Celebrating team engagements, weddings, and births
• Themed sessions: Xmas, Easter, Diwali, Chinese New Year, Matariki

Action point: Create a schedule for different types of team meetings. Tell the team what you are doing and why, especially if you ask them to present.

One-to-One Meetings

One-to-one meetings that are rushed and focus solely on goals aren’t going to set your team on fire, but if you use the meeting for relationship building, you’ll build trust with each of your direct reports.

To make one-to-one meetings work, they must be private, frequent, and focused on empowering your team to flourish.

Start the meeting by asking how things are going to estimate engagement and if your direct report is OK. There may be work or personal issues that you aren’t aware of.

Next, discuss progress on goals, any changes, and plans for next week. Check out whether your team member needs any resources or if anything is stopping them from achieving their goals.

You may need to step in to get access to people, information, or systems if your direct report isn’t getting any joy themselves.

Remember to check on the progress of any agreed training. Many hard-working people neglect their own development and need a push from their manager.

End the one-to-one by asking about well-being again. Check whether the workload for the next week is manageable and how confident your direct report is about achieving their goals.

This way, you are checking on work progress, your team member’s wellbeing, and if they have the resources and capacity to accomplish their work.

Action point: Book one-to-ones with each team member and use my one-to-one process.

NB: You can get a free one-to-one form here.

Summary

Meetings can be effective, but only if you run them properly. Otherwise, meetings can be a drain on your time and energy.

“Meetings are places where dead ideas rise from their graves and eat the brains of the living.” — Dave Barry

Action points:

• Book your next three strategy meetings into your calendar.
• Create a schedule for different types of team meetings. Tell the team what you are doing and why, especially if you ask them to present.
• Book one-to-ones with each team member and follow my one-to-one process. Download a free one-to-one form here.

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