3 Tips to Make Your Weekly Team Meetings More Effective

Taking the time to strategize, clarifying your immediate and long-term goals is essential for a well-run, successful team. Weekly meetings should be an essential part of any organization that is striving to work as a cohesive unit. Unfortunately, not all meetings are productive endeavors and they often tend to be a complete waste of time.

The old adage that ‘Time Is Money’ has never been truer in today’s highly competitive, fast paced environment. Having your team step away from their work needs to be justified by having highly productive, positive meetings that ultimately help achieve your goals.

Statistics show that upper management and company executives often spend over 50% of their time in meetings. Unfortunately, that same pool of executives feels like the vast majority of those meetings are not productive and actually hinder their ability to get their work done.

So how do you ensure that you are maximizing everyone’s time and having productive, positive meetings where the attendees feel that their valuable time was well spent?

ISC’s team of executive recruiters have compiled 3 tips from corporate professionals to make meetings both effective and a pleasure to attend for employees:

Begin with Positives

For any meeting to be productive you need to have the individual attention of all those who are present. If you begin the meeting discussing the negatives, you will rapidly lose the attention of your audience as they will feel targeted and start wishing for the meeting to be over. The first thing you should do in any meeting is discuss the positives and acknowledge the work your team is doing. If you need to mention any negatives, do so in a constructive way instead of being overly critical, & only AFTER highlighting the positives.

READ MORE: 7 Things Great Leaders Do Every Day

Encourage Engagement and Contribution

An executive with strong leadership skills will encourage all attendees to contribute for a productive meeting. An effective meeting is one where all the people attending actively participate and give their input on how to accomplish objectives & overcome various challenges.

By encouraging engagement and asking questions from different individuals, you will get a wider range of potential solutions to various problems and generate more innovative ideas on how to achievement your stated goals.

Plan to Inspect what you Expect!

All meetings should strive to end on a positive note and give proper guidance to all on how to proceed once they go back to their daily tasks. The person chairing the meeting should reiterate the game plan based on the issues and solutions discussed in the meeting and give the employees a clear plan on how to move forward.

Most important, clear cut expectations should be outlined, with the expectation that there will be follow-up to ensure that the action items have been implemented.

Find Exceptional Candidates for Executive Positions with ISC

International Search Consultants has been one of the leading executive recruiting agencies in the United States for more than 20 years. Our team of 15 search consultants includes highly-qualified and skilled executive recruiters with extensive experience in helping organizations across the US find top talent with industry specific experience & existing relationships with decision makers for executive positions.

Get in touch with us today for more details regarding our comprehensive executive recruitment services.

Ann Zaslow-Rethaber is President of International Search Consultants and can be reached at 888-866-7276 or at [email protected]

Carolyn McClendon is a Senior Executive Recruiter with ISC and can be reached direct dial at 888-974-0086 or at [email protected]