How to Run More Effective Team Meetings

How many meetings do you have scheduled next week?

Go ahead, pull up your calendar right now. Three? Five? Ten? 

If your calendar is full of internal staff meetings, it's safe to assume that you're not the only one on your team who is dealing with an overloaded schedule.

While some meetings are critical, there's a good chance that you can optimize your team meetings by following some of the best practices that we've learned over the years.

In this blog post, you will learn:

• The Impact of Eliminating "The Dreaded Presentation"
• The Golden Rule: No agenda, no meeting
• The Benefits of Collaborative Software
• How to Optimize Status Meetings with Demand Metric

The Impact of Eliminating "The Dreaded Presentation"

Stop forcing your team members to "quickly run through" your presentations.

Instead, send materials that you would use during your meeting to participants at least 24 hours in advance so they can familiarize themselves with your deck.

If you need feedback from your team and believe that a meeting is necessary, ask for specific feedback in advance so that you can obtain meaningful input. 

Asking for feedback in advance will cut down meeting time significantly. Plus, instead of a few people doing all the talking, you can have a more valuable discussion because everyone on your team can prepare. The result? Time savings and increased productivity for all.

The Golden Rule: No Agenda, No Meeting 

Are your team members being dragged along for the ride in meetings they shouldn't be in at all? 

When you have an agenda, you can keep participants from wasting time by stating clear objectives for every meeting. 

Having specific objectives will help determine who's needed in the meeting while ensuring that the conversation remains focused and on track.

The Benefits of Collaboration Software

One of the biggest culprits of wasteful meetings is status update meetings.

The use of collaborative software dramatically reduces the need for an hour long (let's face it…sometimes 2 hours long) status updates. Project managers often organize these and involve everyone who needs to report on their progress towards deadlines. Collecting this information is crucial, but does it have to be done in person every week? We don't think so.

Using collaborative software can reduce the need for long-winded status update meetings by enabling all members to communicate online in a shared discussion space – one essential function of a collaborative software platform.

Project leaders can access conversations at any time to gather updates. If they have any questions, they can reach out to individual team members directly, rather than scheduling a meeting for the entire team.

How to Optimize Status Meetings with Demand Metric

That said, we realize the right technology is only half the battle. Instead of a weekly hour-long meeting, try having shorter meetings more frequently.

Our team members have regular "Standup" meetings. Our Standups usually last around 10 minutes, and each person answers three crucial questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments in your way?

 
The goal of each Standup is to help the team understand what everyone's working on, and how they can help to get things done collaboratively.

Most Standup meetings take place with the team standing so that everyone stays engaged and not get too comfortable.

Here's the simple calculation that we used to make the call on Standups vs. weekly team meetings:

Voila! We have just found an extra 40 minutes each week AND our team is working more collaboratively than ever before.

Here at Demand Metric, we're advocates of a Kanban or Scrumban approach. To learn a bit more about Agile Marketing, check out this post.

Analyst Bottom Line

By taking advantage of a project management tool for team collaboration, you can make better use of the time that you spend together as a team. 

• Meeting Agenda Template: Organize meeting topics, timelines, and speakers
• Agile Backlog Tool: Organize your Product and User Story Backlog.
• User Story Prioritization Tool: Find the most useful user stories or tasks.
• Sprint Planning Tool: Plan and track what is involved in each sprint. 
• Kanban Chart: Organize and visually show the context for tasks.
• Scrum Master Checklist: Quickly review how well your team is doing.
• Standup Checklist: Ensure your Standups do not miss anything important.
• Sprint Review Checklist: Ensure your Review follows best practices.
• Sprint Retrospective Checklist: Ensure lessons learned are leveraged.