How to Lead an Effective Team Meeting | DT Evolve

Introduction

Everyone has attended bad team meetings.

However, team meetings do not have to be mind-numbing, time-consuming, or chaotic. They can be productive times for brainstorming, team building, information sharing, and decision-making if they are properly planned with a helpful team meeting agenda and a commitment to staying on track.

But how do you ensure that your team members find the meeting to be interesting, informative, and motivating rather than tedious and frustrating?

Tragically, there are a few normal errors you can make that transform group gatherings into group bad dreams.

We have compiled some of our best hacks on how to run a team meeting so that your entire team feels empowered and energized to help you avoid this.

Before Beginning: Are you Ready to Lead a Meeting of  Team?

Before the first attendee even arrives, a team meeting’s potential can be destroyed by lack of preparation. How can you hope that the time spent at the meeting will be well-spent if there is no established role structure, no meeting agenda, and no focus?

Regardless of the sort of gathering, great planning is essential to running an effective group meeting. Before starting a team meeting, managers should follow these three steps.

Make a rundown of who will be welcome to the gathering

Will all members of the team be present at the team meeting? Do you intend to include members of your team who work remotely or keep the meeting entirely in person?

Settle on a gathering time and how much time you want for it

If you make it longer than it needs to be, the attendees will conclude that the team meeting was pointless. Set aside 15 to 20 minutes for daily stand-ups to get in touch quickly; anything longer can take up too much of your time at work. Time may be required for less frequent meetings, such as weekly collaboration sessions. These meetings should be scheduled for at least 45 minutes to an hour, or longer if the week has been particularly hectic with numerous updates. You need to permit sufficient opportunity to utilize the gathering time successfully, particularly in the event that real work is being finished — however not so lengthy that your group’s commitment endures.

Step 1:Choose a place for the meeting.

Include a way for members of your remote team to attend via Zoom or another video conferencing platform if they are participating.

Now is the time to work on the agenda for the team meeting. Establish the meeting’s objective and prioritize the most pressing items on the agenda. Choose the topics you will discuss next and the first. Consider your team meeting’s conclusion and next steps. Demos, reviewing goals and objectives, and establishing new action items are just a few examples.

Distribute the agenda to all attendees to help them comprehend the meeting’s objective and prepare for participation.

Step 2: Establish roles 

Every participant needs to have an established role in order to run a successful meeting. Each stakeholder can prepare their parts by assigning these roles in advance. This assists the gathering with adhering to the fundamental plan of things, keeping away from useless digressions, and by and large taking full advantage of the gathering time.

There are several crucial roles in meetings. The meeting leader usually doubles as the team leader and is in charge of setting the agenda and conducting the meeting. The person who takes the notes records the meeting minutes and takes notes of new ideas and plans for action as they come up. There must also be a facilitator for every successful meeting, someone who keeps an eye on the clock and redirects off-topic discussions and tangents from the agenda.

It is essential to rotate these roles so that various team members can participate in various capacities. Different people’s participation and engagement are enhanced when they are given responsibility and input. This is especially important when there are members of the team who work from home and may not feel as connected to the group as those who work in the office.

Step 3: Select attendees 

Let’s examine how to select attendees for a team meeting. While inviting the entire team may appear to be the smartest option, this is not always the case. The average team member spends at least three hours a week in meetings, according to Zippia. That amounts to nearly 10% of their workweek!

On the off chance that the gathering objective doesn’t include some colleagues, why burn through their time by expecting them to join in? It’s reasonable to need to keep everybody “in the know,” however on the off chance that a member won’t profit from a gathering — or enhance it — then their time is better spent by zeroing in on their work. You always have the option of adding them later if something pertinent arises during the meeting.

Make sure that only people who can either contribute to or benefit from the team meeting’s objective are on the list of attendees.

Also Read: Team Meetings for First-time Managers

Step by Step Instructions to Run a Group Meeting: 

Few essential leadership tips Here are a few of our best advice for managers to keep in mind when planning team meetings.

1. Designate a Meeting Facilitator 

The person in charge of keeping the team meeting’s conversation productive is the meeting facilitator. A great facilitator is necessary for every great meeting.

There are a number of reasons why having a facilitator for the meeting makes it run more smoothly. They keep the conversation on track with the agenda, preventing participants from wandering off and making the meeting pointless. A meeting facilitator’s ability to ensure that everyone in the meeting, not just those who are the loudest or most outgoing, has their ideas and voices heard is yet another positive advantage. This helps make gatherings more comprehensive, particularly during virtual gatherings.

If you give your meeting facilitator a meeting facilitation cheat sheet, you can give them some direction on what to do if a meeting starts to go wrong.

2. Focus on Collaboration Rather than Reporting 

How often have you attended a team meeting only to be handed a lengthy report and told to “scroll to page 3…”? Did you mentally shut down and groan inwardly in dread? You did, of course.

The amount of teamwork that occurs during a meeting is an indication of a good meeting. Share achievements, objectives came to, and impending drives. Participants will be turned off if you clog meetings with tedious reports that can be shared via email. Except for your report, their thoughts will wander to happy hour tonight or the upcoming weekend.

Additionally, wasting meeting time on analytics review is counterproductive. Participants have the opportunity to connect and communicate with one another during team meetings.

The attendees can feel like they have accomplished something significant when they leave the meeting by discussing strategies for overcoming challenges, making plans for upcoming projects, and making plans for team management and decision-making.

3. Engage Everyone in your Meeting 

As a team leader, it is critical that you encourage everyone in a meeting to voice their opinions, provide status updates (when required), and contribute ideas and feedback. They may experience feelings of frustration and disengagement, which may even lower their morale, if they do not believe that the forum is open to them. In the event that there are individuals who don’t make some noise during the gathering, circle back to them around the finish of the gathering and request their feedback straightforwardly.

Encouragement of all team members to participate in meetings has many advantages. Your less outgoing team members will still be thankful that you encouraged them to contribute, even if they are uncomfortable speaking in front of a large group.

If you don’t personally provide these team members with a safe space to speak, they might keep great ideas to themselves. One way to make sure you don’t miss out on great ideas from people who are less likely to speak up at meetings is to do this.

4. Try Different Things with Exercises and Gamification

To construct and upgrade powerful group gatherings, search for and execute exercises and activities to keep them new, and empower inventiveness and commitment. Gamification is one method for achieving this.

The fundamental concept of gamification is the application of game elements to non-game situations. This idea can be applied to team meetings by coming up with fun ideas and using them for team building (they could compete against another team to achieve a goal) or self-expression (create a team slogan or a poem about your business). Even though you don’t want gamification to take up the whole meeting, a short activity can help everyone relax, encourage teamwork, and spark creativity.

Meeting devices and coordinated effort instruments give special ways of drawing in colleagues by using components of gamification, like scoring and rivalry.

5. Ask Questions that Open up Discussion

We’ve all been in meetings where only the leader talks or shares anything. Those are so dull it’s mind-numbing. That’s why it’s so important for the team leader to think of ways to get people involved in the process by letting them talk freely. The following are some excellent conversation starters:

What was your greatest achievement? On the off chance that you’re in a week after week group meeting, you would need to catch wind of more successive, likely more modest, accomplishments. In the event that you’re in a yearly gathering, the narratives would be bigger and more compelling. One way or the other, this question allows everybody an opportunity to take part and be found in a positive light.

What materials do you require from me? A great way to empower your team members is to let them know that you want to support their success. Tools for collaboration, brand-new laptops, more training, or even a longer lunch might be their responses. Listening is the most important thing.

From now until our next meeting, what is on your priority list? It is helpful to know how each team member manages their jobs and whether they require any assistance from you by knowing what they consider to be “hot.” For instance, if a person brings up the same hot list after two or three meetings, you should probably step in and see what you can do to assist them in crossing it off their list.

6. Gather Input from Team Members 

Your objective ought to be to continuously enhance the efficiency of your team meetings. To ensure that all aspects of the meeting are achieving the set goals, solicit feedback from attendees.

Recognize that you want your team members to be open about their thoughts because you can only improve meetings and make them more effective if you get real feedback on how well they went. This can be made easier by using Range, a meeting management tool, to collect and keep a digital record of feedback. You will be able to make a plan for improvement and compare the outcomes over time thanks to this.

Also Read: 10 Tips to Overcome Imposter Syndrome at Workplace

7. Lead by Example

 Managers set a good example in many aspects of their jobs, including how to make meetings go well. Be focused, on time, and well-prepared. Encourage others to engage in open communication as well. Maintain focus by adhering to the agenda template and timetable. Respect the organizer of the meeting. Participation and engagement across the entire team will rise as a result of team members mimicking you during meetings over time.

8. Utilize Meeting Management Software

As technology can help raise the standard of team meetings like it does with almost everything else today. Team meetings can be made more efficient and effective if you are able to automate a portion of your agenda. Your meeting will be more successful because you and your team will have an easier time sharing notes, action items, and keeping everyone informed thanks to these tools.

You can make team meetings more productive by sharing meeting templates, dynamic agendas, and methods for following up on action items with Range’s meeting management tools.

9. Take Notes and Follow up on Action Items

Meetings shouldn’t end when participants sign off on their laptops or leave the room. To expand a gathering’s viability, it’s vital to take notes all through group gatherings, lay out things to do, and circle back to them. Utilizing a note-taking template at each meeting will help you become more proficient at taking notes. Set a suggestion to follow up in a few days, and ensure everybody realizes you’ll do that. For the meeting to produce results, follow-up is essential.

10. Keep Iterating 

Team meetings are a part of working life in a company and won’t go away. You should keep iterating over team meetings until you have a strategy that works best. Try inviting a different team leader to each meeting to keep things interesting and fresh. Bring a short game from another member of the team. Include role-playing in your skill practice. The primary objective is to maintain everyone’s attention and interest in the meeting’s agenda. Don’t give up, even though it might take some time to complete.

Also Read: Sharing Feedback as a Manager-5 Amazing Aspects

Conclusion

Team meetings can either keep your employees informed about your business or they can be a waste of time. Preparation is everything. Getting basic questions answered in advance helps your meeting accomplish its goal.

Do you know who, how, and what your meetings are about? Before you do anything, sort out what should be examined. You will be able to plan how you will present your side of the meeting once you know what the meeting is for. Last but not least, select who should be invited to keep your meetings focused. You can have interesting team meetings like this that save time and benefit everyone involved.