How often do you find your team dragging their feet to meetings? Are they reluctant to participate? Meetings are more important to organizational health than team leaders may realize.
A meeting room is where decisions are made, collaboration occurs, and problems are solved. Everything related to organizational health occurs here. The only issue is most employees don’t actually enjoy meetings. A cohesive team and the health of the organization comes to fruition in team meetings.
As a leader, your meetings are the single most important activity you will do. Better preparation, agendas, and tracking minutes aren’t necessarily the key to improving your meetings. You want the team to leave with a clear vision or understanding of what they should be working on and what the end goal is.
Meetings don’t have to be long, confusing, or stressful. Transform your team meetings to energizing, productive, and focused! In this blog we’ll be sharing why meetings are the heart of organizational health and the four different types of meetings you can have to improve your overall organization health.
How do meetings and organizational health go hand in hand?
In order to have a productive meeting they must be broken up into different types. A healthy organization does not just mean culture or employee engagement. It also means the ability to rally around a common vision and execute said vision effectively.
A key part to making sure each meeting is successful is to lay out the correct and sometimes controversial issues at the beginning. By laying everything on the table, employees will want to figure out the issues at the start. They will be less likely to check out.
The factors of organizational health and cohesive teamwork come together in meetings. During these times, you’ll create clarity, make decisions, deal with crises and overcome dysfunctional behaviors.
The most important thing you can do as a leader for your team is to conduct meetings well.
The organized meetings will be more useful and valuable for your team.
Four Meeting Types
Leaders often try to put too many different topics into the same meeting and then scratch their heads wondering why it doesn’t work so well. Not every topic needs to be part of the same meeting but more often than not, staff meetings turn into a jumbled mess of different issues and subjects.
When this happens, team members get confused and frustrated. They aren’t sure what they should be working on, what they should say, and they just want to get out of the meeting.
Meetings need to be broken up into different types of meetings to avoid this confusion.
More meetings instead of less might seem shocking. However, the sole difference is when meetings are broken down they are shorter and more useful for the team. Rather than leaving meetings confused and having had the dread of attending, employees will realize the value of each one and they are being productive and completing their work.
When you fix the structure of your meetings, you’ll find your team’s morale and mood will improve. It also changes how you and your team feel about the job while getting the most important work done.
We have included a debrief of the four different kinds of meetings every business should consider for a healthy organization.
Daily Check-Ins
One of the simplest types of meetings but it happens to be one of the most valuable. Check-ins should only take five to ten minutes in the morning and can be done either in person or virtually.
The purpose is to keep the team aligned and informed. Think of this type of meeting as a huddle like a sports team would do before a game. The point of this meeting is to talk with your team and connect.
Once your team is in the habit of checking in daily, it will save time spent trying to track people down, sending emails, and getting clarity on projects.
Tactical Meetings
This type of meeting is held either weekly or bi-weekly to discuss the tactical side of your business. You’ll have the chance to review goals that have previously been established from the last meeting. It’s a good opportunity to ask your team if they need assistance with their tasks.
Give each team member the chance to discuss what is keeping them from achieving their goals. Use this time to find solutions to the problems you and your team might be facing.
It is vital to make sure these meetings don’t turn into a strategy meeting.
ADHOC Strategic Meeting
This meeting is held when an issue comes up that requires immediate attention. It could mean industry changes, competitor news, or an emergency.
Set aside time to meet and tackle one issue. Use the time to brainstorm, share ideas, and take the necessary steps to resolve the issue. These meetings are needed in order to give the issues the necessary time needed in order to work on the issues.
As a leader, you’ll find your team is more likely to be engaged during this type of meeting.
The Quarterly Offsite
Aim to have these meetings once every three months. The goal is to get out of the office for either a half or full day where you won’t be interrupted.
Find an offsite conference room to take a step back and reconnect with your team. How are they really doing? What is working and what isn’t?
This gives team leaders time to slow down, take a step back, and reflect on if what they are doing is working. Far too often, team leaders don’t take the time to connect with their team because they are “too busy”.
In order to reach the end goal and bigger picture, you have to slow down. When you are constantly going, you can’t gage if you are taking the proper steps to move forward.
It might be an adjustment to change your meeting strategy at first. Once it is deployed, it provides immediate value for organizational health. Go into each meeting with a clear understanding of the objective. It is important for leadership teams to spend a small portion of their time working to solve organizational issues.
Have the four different types of meetings contributed positively to your organizational health? Let us know in the comments.
At NexLevel, we’re experts in building healthy organizations through cohesive teams and engaged employees. We will help you and your employees become the high-performance team you’ve always wanted to be by focusing on collaboration, creativity, culture, and connection. Let’s Connect
Patrick Lencioni’s book “Death by Meeting” is an interesting read, you may enjoy.
