Tips for Effective Team Meetings.

Team meetings are a great way to bring your team together. It can serve as a period of brainstorming, sharing information, or even as a time to learn new skills. It helps to bring your team together, while allowing them to find better ways to grow your business. 

That being said, these meetings can often lose their purpose if you aren’t prepared for them. Here are some tips to have effective team meetings.

Set a time and location with plenty of notice. Give your employees plenty of notice about the meeting. If you are doing it online, make sure that everyone knows where they need to be and how to log on to the session. You may also want to give everyone a heads-up the day before, as a reminder. 

Have an agenda. You shouldn’t ever have a meeting without a written agenda. Included in this agenda should be the purpose of the meeting. If there is no purpose, you might want to postpone it, until you have one. You should also have a list of the topics that you want to discuss with your team. You may want to talk about some problems that are going on, so your team can brainstorm solutions. If decisions need to be made within the team, that should be listed. You should give a copy of this to your team the day before so that they have time to prepare! 

Give everyone a chance to speak. You should give yourself plenty of time to have a meeting. If you want everyone’s opinions, you want to leave some extra time. If someone isn’t comfortable speaking in front of a group, you can let your employees know that they can hand in their notes so that you can take that into consideration. 

It may also help to send out a recap afterward. This could just be notes that were written up on the agenda paperwork so that the entire team remembers what happened if they need to look at it in the future. 

Team meetings can be a great way to get your team together and have an open discussion. That being said, it is too easy to get off track, unless you have an agenda. You may even want to send out a meeting recap, so that everyone can go over it one more time, as well as have it for the future if needed!