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4 Questions To Ask Your Team Members Today -ok

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4 Questions To Ask Your Team Members Today -ok

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This article lists the four essential questions to ask team members in order to understand them and their work. Doing this helps in improving your team's morale.

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Knowing how to ask the right questions can be the difference between being an okay manager and a great one.
Asking employees the four questions below will get you insight into your team members and their work, help you understand where you can be the most useful, in many cases improve your team's work product, and even increase people's morale.
1. What's worrying you right now?
You might assume that you'll hear about it when an employee is worried about a project or a deadline or a difficult client, but in reality, many employees assume that they're supposed to handle this kind of thing without involving you. Asking this question can open the door to all kinds of information and concerns that you might never hear about otherwise. You might end up learning about a client who's about to be very upset by something, or that another department isn't getting your employee what she needs quickly enough, or that your employee has real concerns about the strategy she's overseeing. Hearing this kind of thing gives you a chance to give input and guidance, intervene where you need to, and help your staff member think through solutions and course-correct when necessary.
2. What's going really well right now?
This question can elicit things that your employee is really excited about (which may be things you don't realize they're highly motivated by), and talking about it can give them a sense of accomplishment and progress. Plus, you might learn details that you didn't know about - things your team is doing that make you proud.

And if you follow up by asking about why they think it's going so well, you and the employee both might be able to draw out valuable lessons that can be used in the future.
3. What should we be doing differently?
Your employees have a different perspective on some things than you, because they're more deeply involved in some areas, less involved in others, and simply have a different vantage point than you do. They likely have thoughts on what could be done differently or better, but people don't always speak up about this kind of thing - because they have their hands full with their core jobs, or they're not sure that a suggestion of change would be welcome, or it just hasn't occurred to them that you'd want their thoughts.

Explicitly asking people to talk with you about what could be done differently reinforces that you welcome their input and that you're open to change - and can result in you making improvements in areas where you didn't even know improvement was needed.
4. What do we need to do to get you to sign on for another year?
Sometimes the reason managers lose their best people is because they never actually asked them to stay. It sounds obvious, but when's the last time you talked to your highest performers about how to retain them? Even if you don't get an immediate commitment, having an explicit discussion and showing that you care enough to talk about it can have a significant impact on how valued people feel and whether they stick around.

Of course, you also need other retention strategies in the mix, including salary, professional growth, new challenges, and so forth - but don't underestimate the power of a direct conversation about someone's future.

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4 Questions To Ask Your Team Members Today

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Knowing how to ask the right questions can be the difference between being an okay manager and a great one. Asking employees the four questions below will get you insight into your team members and their work, help you understand where you can be the most useful, in many cases improve your team's work product, and even increase people's morale.

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Five Questions You Must Ask Your Team -ok

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Five Questions You Must Ask Your Team -ok

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While measuring employee engagement is essential, measurement alone does not create engagement. It is a process and requires intentionality and involvement of all key players. This article lists five questions to ask the team in order to improve the workplace.

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Measuring employee engagement is essential for companies that want to perform at their peak. But let's be clear about one thing: Measurement doesn't cause engagement.

Top-down solutions may produce clarity, but they don't inspire buy-in or practicality.

Many companies use Gallup's Q ¹² employee engagement survey to measure engagement at the workgroup level, which gives them insight into where engagement is strong and where it can improve. But simply measuring engagement will not cause managers or employees to be engaged. Engagement is the result of many factors, including individual and team commitment to improving the workplace.

One proven strategy to increase engagement is action planning, a process that managers and their teams use to make plans and take action based on their Q ¹² results. I've spoken with hundreds of managers about engagement and action planning, and I've found that managers ask me these two questions more often than any others: "How do I get my team to buy in to action planning?" and "How do I make it practical?"

These are reasonable questions. Managers want to fix problems. They want to isolate the engagement problem, find a solution, and implement it as soon as possible. Meanwhile, their employees are watching them, wondering if this is just another one-time survey or if this is a long-term process that will finally identify and correct problems that need to be fixed.

That's why so many well-meaning managers jump right in to interpreting numbers from a report, often choosing areas of focus without involving their teams or considering business outcomes. So when managers complain that their team hasn't bought in to their plan, I ask a question of my own: "Whose plan was it?" Usually, the response is something along the lines of, "Well, it was mine."

Top-down solutions may produce clarity, but they don't inspire buy-in or practicality. That's because top-down decision making about engagement fails to recognize the varying dynamics among workgroups. More importantly, it misses an opportunity to engage teams in creating and "owning" their own solutions.
Engagement is a process
Engagement should be treated as a process, not a one-time event; it is an indicator of a workgroup's fitness, not a stand-alone outcome. Engagement also requires intentionality and a scalable structure. Managers and employees need to be involved in the action-planning process, and the process must be replicable. But too many managers approach building engagement as they would choosing a cellphone carrier: They consider the variables, make a decision, and move on until the contract expires, neglecting to seek feedback from people who have actually experienced the carrier's service.

I've listened to the difficulties managers face trying to create meaningful action plans, and I've heard everything from excuses like "We don't have time for this" to legitimate concerns such as "It's tough because my team is located in five different sites across three time zones."

Through conversations like these, I've found that the following five questions are a practical approach for thinking and talking about engagement. They also ensure maximum participation, practicality, intentionality, and scale. I have asked managers these questions many times, and I recommend that managers use them with their teams immediately before sharing their Q ¹² survey results. For many managers and teams, they have become an essential part of the action-planning process.
Question one: How do we define each of the Q¹² items in our workgroup? For example, how do we define "materials and equipment" for our team?
Gallup's Q ¹² is a 12-item measure of employee engagement, and each item addresses a specific element of engagement. These items include statements such as "I know what is expected of me at work," "I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right," and "My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work."(See sidebar "The 12 Elements of Great Managing.")

Individual workgroups have different cultures and needs, so they should discuss what they think about each element of engagement. The temptation here is for companies to define what Q ¹² items mean in the organization. But a better approach is for managers to ask their teams how each specific item applies to the realities of their particular workgroup. Managers should ask their team this question, then pay close attention to what emerges from the discussion.

For example, I consulted with a large technology company that had recently experienced a round of budget cuts, and travel had been frozen. Their remote workers were most likely to cite videoconferencing when defining the materials and equipment most important to them. Most managers weren't surprised by this, but they varied widely in how they responded to this feedback. Predictably, managers who dismissed videoconferencing as too expensive or as outside the realm of their control were those with the lowest levels of engagement relative to their peers.
Question two: Now that we defined each of the Q¹² items for our workgroup, what would the ideal look like for each item?
Making engagement happen isn't just a manager's responsibility.

Sometimes, I'll encourage managers to dream a little with their teams. If budgets didn't exist, for example, what would the ideal materials and equipment be for their team? Often, the answers are surprisingly mundane -- workgroups rarely want what's impossible, even when the sky's the limit.

Many managers are hesitant to have this discussion with their workers, citing that it might create false expectations or set an impossible standard. This hesitation, however, is unfounded. The purpose is not for the team members to say, "If we have x, we'd rate this item a 5." Instead, the purpose is to establish aspiration and ownership, empowering the team to consider what their efforts might achieve and creating a benchmark to which the team can aspire.

For example, despite the budget realities that many teams face, many of the managers I talk with have generated new ideas for remaining connected using existing materials and equipment, such as emailing a "question of the day" about the company to members of their teams or using videoconferencing in addition to conference calls to create face-to-face connections. When the teams dreamed a little, they often found they already had the materials and equipment they needed to solve the problem.
Question three: What is the difference between where we are now and that ideal?
Having established what the ideal looks like, the team can take the bold step of asking how far away from it they are. This process affords opportunity for celebration, building on previous successes, and establishing best practices. It also promotes candid discussion and creates an environment where team members can share and support their views. This helps teams grow and mature and gives everyone a chance to claim responsibility for areas that might lie within their control.

After we talked about how to use these questions, one manager conducted his action-planning meeting and reported back. "I told the team where I thought I'd been getting in the way and admitted some mistakes I'd made over the last few months," he said. "It was hard, but I think the team appreciated it." This kind of transparency builds goodwill and creates a platform for more open dialogue.
Question four: As we think about our action plan, which items have the greatest impact on our culture or performance?
Engagement must be tied to performance because it benefits businesses in tangible ways. Otherwise, the exercise and conversation are pointless, and employees will rightly wonder why they must participate in activities that have no real purpose or practical utility. Again, measuring engagement shouldn't be an end in itself.

Making engagement happen isn't just a manager's responsibility. As employees identify aspects of culture and performance that would benefit from increases in engagement, they begin to think in solution-oriented ways. They begin to own the culture, their performance, and their own engagement.

This question also grants vital permission to take the discussion further. Managers and teams start asking themselves more questions, such as: "Is it OK to prioritize some items and defer others based on the team's stated objectives?" and "What items are most likely to drive those objectives?"

As I debriefed with a manager after a recent action-planning session, he told me that the team had chosen to focus on the item "My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work." They chose this item because their team both depended on and served internal customers, and they thought that improving in this area would shorten wait times for their stakeholders and improve their internal brand, which had suffered recently.

It's neither advisable nor desirable to include every item in an action plan. It's far better to focus on the items that will bring the greatest return on invested time and effort at a particular time, because the team's needs and circumstances will change. Every element of engagement is important and links to key business outcomes. But using this question to narrow the focus to a few key items will reveal what is important for the workgroup now.
Question five: What is every person on the team willing to do about engagement?
Too many companies treat engagement like an a la carte menu from which the manager chooses everything. If an engagement process results in open dialogue among the team members and the team identifies expected outcomes and areas in which to invest, yet the manager is the only person who leaves the meeting with a to-do list, then action planning has failed.

A good action-planning meeting is one in which every attendee leaves with a next step. Each member of the team must contribute and have a role to play. People are more eager to invest in ideas they helped generate than those initiated from the top down.

In addition to creating accountability, this question also enables the team to decide that some ideas, though compelling, have too many barriers to implement immediately, while others present more positively. For example, budget limitations might make travel or the purchase of new equipment difficult. While these options should be explored, they might not be part of the final action plan as a result.
Engagement isn't solely a manager-driven outcome
When used as a template for action planning, these five questions yield the critical elements of buy-in and practical action. They also help dispel the myth that engagement is solely a manager-driven outcome. While managers can influence engagement, they can't be expected to generate it alone. Managers who use these questions will get associates involved by creating a conversation. By treating engagement as a process, not an event, they tie engagement to actions that produce cultural improvements and business outcomes.

Five Questions for Action Planning

These five questions offer a practical approach to help managers and teams think and talk about engagement. They work best when managers use them to start a discussion with their teams immediately before reviewing their Q ¹² employee engagement survey results and to develop an action plan to increase engagement.

Question one: How do we define each of the Q ¹² items in our workgroup? For example, how do we define "materials and equipment" for our team?

Question two: Now that we defined each of the Q ¹² items for our workgroup, what would the ideal look like for each item?

Question three: What is the difference between where we are now and that ideal?

Question four: As we think about our action plan, which items have the greatest impact on our culture or performance?

Question five: What is every person on the team willing to do about engagement?

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Measuring employee engagement is essential for companies that want to perform at their peak. But let's be clear about one thing: Measurement doesn't cause engagement. Top-down solutions may produce clarity, but they don't inspire buy-in or practicality.

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3 Things Every Leader Should Ask at Update Meetings - ok

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3 Things Every Leader Should Ask at Update Meetings - ok

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Leaders can keep themselves updated with their team by using this simple process. Jennifer Miller shares the three P’s which are the questions leaders need to ask their team during meetings.

The three P’s are plans, progress, and problems. Each P pertains to different questions that one could possibly ask such as the team goals, wins, and the barriers. Doing so helps to build positive work habits and makes update meetings more meaningful.

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Leaders, do you want a simple, easy-to-remember process for staying up-to-date with your team's workload? Here's an idea I heard from my colleague Sally. (She said it was OK to share with my blog readers, so, thanks Sally!)

Sally told me about a process that one of her favorite managers created to stay in communication with his direct reports. Once a week, Sally would meet with her work team leader to review what he called the "Three P's": Plans, Progress, and Problems.

Plans: This is the forward-thinking part of the conversation. The leaders asks questions such as, "What's on your docket for this week?" and "What are you goals?"

Progress: This "P" refers to the current project slate. The discussion centers around targets met, updates on actions and "wins".

Problems: This third element of the Three P's addresses the challenges that employees are experiencing. Sally and her boss would brainstorm ideas for removing barriers and other ideas to help Sally when she felt stymied or otherwise unable to complete her tasks.

This format works because:

It's super-simple to implement; people can easily remember three things to share with their boss

One of the most important things managers do is remove road blocks for their team members and this format allows for an easy way to do so

If done every week, the consistency builds positive work habits: employees are conditioned to look for plans, progress and problems

In this very complex world, simple is better.
What simple management tools have you used with success with your team members?
Jennifer V. Miller is a leadership development consultant whose writing and digital training materials help business professionals better lead themselves and others towards greater career success. Follow Jennifer on and for her quarterly e-newsletter offering tips for the savvy workplace professional.

Tagged as: Career, Character, Communication, Corporate Culture, Personal Effectiveness

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3 Things Every Leader Should Ask at Update Meetings

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Leaders, do you want a simple, easy-to-remember process for staying up-to-date with your team's workload? Here's an idea I heard from my colleague Sally. (She said it was OK to share with my blog readers, so, thanks Sally!) Sally told me about a process that one of her favorite managers created to stay in communication with his direct reports.

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When you’re about to make an important decision through a meeting, what is the best way to approach it?

According to this video from In59seconds, it is better to hold meetings while standing up. Doing so improves meetings instantly. In a study done by the University of Missouri, meetings that are done while sitting down last 34% longer compared to those standing up. However, both meetings produce the same results

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Buy the book (UK): http://goo.gl/9JaJx3 Buy the book (USA): http://goo.gl/0lGtDR Study: Bluedorn, A. C., Turban, D. B. & Love, M. S. (1999). The Effects of Stand-Up and Sit-Down Meeting Formats on Meeting Outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 277-285.

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Let's face it-you'll never be able to stop going to meetings altogether. There are times when you just need to gather a bunch of your colleagues in a room (or on a video chat) to hash things out in real time. But chances are you can replace your least productive meetings with more effective ones. Here are three new formats that can help get your team out of a rut and back on track.

1. Goalfest

No one likes status-update meetings. So when design leader Joel Califa was hired as a first-time manager at cloud computing platform DigitalOcean, he decided to try something different. "No one knew what anyone else was doing, and I didn't have a way to measure our team's performance. I wanted visibility," Califa recalls. So he invented a meeting form called "goalfest."

Related: Ask These 9 Questions Before Every Meeting To Avoid Wasting Time

In an hourlong meeting on Thursday afternoons, Califa would gather his team of seven designers, and they'd jump into a shared Google spreadsheet. Everyone would set and share their self-directed goals for the following week and score themselves on how well they completed the previous week's goals, on a scale of one to five. By allowing his team to set their own goals publicly and hold themselves accountable, Califa, who now works at GitHub, found he could make sure the meeting belonged to them, rather than to him as their manager.

Over time, Califa's team added a "lessons learned" section to their shared document, meant to identify patterns in what was and wasn't working-for example: "QA always takes longer than you think," or, "Don't jump into high fidelity too soon." The goalfest meeting format has gone on to be adopted by teams at Facebook and BuzzFeed, and the Swedish design firm Nordnet has raved about it.

Goalfest isn't a passive meeting-it only works when everyone takes part. But Califa thinks it's worth the effort, crediting it with taking his team "from medium performing to high performing" over the course of a few months. He's posted an on example spreadsheet his blog for anyone who's curious about trying it out.

Related: This Silicon Valley-Style Meeting Can Transform Your Whole Team

2. Masterminds

Buffer's workforce is distributed, with staff working remotely all over the world. So the social media management platform has developed a meeting format they call "masterminds," which pairs up two team members for regular coaching and support. The meeting format began as a way for cofounders Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich to stay connected and discuss big issues for the business, but they found it so helpful that they introduced it to the rest of the team.

According to Buffer's Courtney Seiter, the format can vary, but one common structure is a one-hour session broken into two parts:

1. 20 minutes to share and celebrate your achievements (10 minutes per participant)

2. 40 minutes to discuss your current top challenges (20 minutes each)

"The goal isn't to solve one another's problems, but instead to gently probe through active listening and asking questions," Seiter told me by email. Similar to "rubber-duck" debugging in programming, this method can generate new ideas and solutions you hadn't been able to see. "It's surprising how often the person solves their own challenge through this process," Seiter adds.

3. Wins Meetings

A 2011 study examined 26 project teams from seven different companies, and found that celebrating small wins can have an outsize impact on team motivation. Since then, several organizations have adapted this idea to hold regular "wins" meetings-designed strictly to recognize small milestones. At my former employer Percolate, the entire team would gather for drinks on Fridays, and everyone would go around and commend one other person or team for a recent "win." We kept at it for years, even as the company grew beyond 150 employees.

This is a popular meeting format because everyone leaves feeling really good about themselves and their teams.

At MICRO, a nonprofit that installs six-foot-tall science museums in public spaces like airports and hospitals, the team gets together for "Formal Fridays," where bragging about an achievement is mandatory. On certain days they might wear black tie, but most days they just wear hats. According to cofounder Amanda Schochet, it's been a fun way to keep their team, which is split between New York and California, connected. As a bonus, they've accumulated a bunch of silly screenshots of the team wearing things on their heads.

Knotel, which operates a network of designed and managed working spaces, uses a wins meeting to reinforce its values. According to VP of Growth Trevor Clark, as the company grew, leadership looked for ways to keep everyone moving fast without falling out of sync on what the company stands for. "We wanted to roll this out in a way so that people understood how these values related to their job-that it was more than just hitting their numbers," Clark explains.

One of Knotel's values is to "don't look away," which simply means to care about the details, even if it just means improving something by another 1%. taking that to heart, Clark noticed that "our one-pager was a little outdated and too filled with jargon. I thought I could improve it and made a 0.1 version that I tested with a client. It worked well, I sent it out to marketing, and now it's getting rolled out across the team." Knotel's wins meetings are designed to recognize contributions like these, which may start small but add up to something significant.

If there's one thing these three meeting formats share, it's the habit of making the meeting valuable for the entire team, not just the organization or the manager in charge. If your meetings aren't giving everyone a chance to feel valued, set their own priorities, and reflect on how they can improve, you might want to rethink your approach.

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3 Creative Meeting Formats To Make Your Whole Team More Effective

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Let's face it-you'll never be able to stop going to meetings altogether. There are times when you just need to gather a bunch of your colleagues in a room (or on a video chat) to hash things out in real time. But chances are you can replace your least productive meetings with more effective ones.

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Executive Summary

Meetings aren't just about delivering results. You also want participants to leave feeling connected, valued, and fulfilled. Of course, you should still be focused on achieving the meeting outcomes but having a thoughtful meeting and a productive one don't have to be at odds. Work hard on being present. Take adequate time to prepare so that you can be available and attentive before and during the meeting. Demonstrate empathy. Observe, listen, ask thoughtful questions, avoid distractions and multi-tasking. Set up rules about avoiding distractions (e.g. no checking email) and slow down the conversation to include everyone. Crafting a quality experience in your meetings takes time, but it's worth it.

Marion Barraud for HBR

There's a lot of advice out there about how to make meetings more efficient and productive. And while it's true that leading focused, deliberate conversations is critical to organizational performance, meetings aren't just about delivering results. There's another outcome that leaders should be paying more attention to: creating a quality experience for each participant.

What is a quality experience in a meeting? I define it as when employees leave feeling more connected, valued, and fulfilled. Of course, you should still be focused on achieving the meeting outcomes, but thoughtful meetings and productive ones don't have to be at odds.

I've worked with managers and project leaders to create these kinds of experiences. We begin by asking people to reflect on their best team experience and answer two questions: What does a powerful group look like? What does it mean to be powerful in a group?

The second question typically elicits answers like these:

"I never left anything important unsaid. When I spoke, I felt like I was being heard, and I believed that what I said had an impact."

"It felt like I was really a member of the group. Everyone seemed genuinely interested in each other and in what was going on in our lives."

"I knew that I added value, both in the meetings and outside of them."

In other words, each group meeting added to the experience of being a productive, valued member of the group.

Here's what I've seen leaders do to create that quality experience:

Work hard on being present. Take adequate time to prepare so that you can be available and attentive before and during the meeting. If you're running late because of another meeting or still thinking about how to conduct this meeting, you'll be preoccupied and not truly available for anyone who wants to connect.

Preparation allows you to relax about leading the meeting and pay more attention to "reading the room" - noticing how people are doing as they walk in, and throughout the meeting.

You and Your Team Series

Meetings

Demonstrate empathy. People associate attention with caring - your attention matters. Observe, listen, ask thoughtful questions, and avoid distractions and multitasking. Empathy is a learned skill that can be practiced by simply setting aside your phone and computer for two to three hours each week and really listening to someone. Meetings can be your primary place to hone this skill.

Set up and manage the conversation. Ask the group for permission to deliberately manage the conversation. It's important to establish some guidelines about distraction. Ask people to:

avoid using technology unless it is pertinent to the topics

avoid any distracting behavior - verbal or nonverbal

listen and respect people when they're speaking

invite others to speak if their view needs to be heard

Include enough time on every topic to allow broad participation. This means having fewer agenda items and more time allocated to each topic. As a target, put 20% fewer items on your agenda and allow 20% more time for each item.

Slow down the conversation to include everyone. I like the idea of social turn-taking, where you have a sense of who has or hasn't spoken and whether the conversation is being controlled or dominated by one or more people. You don't need to set this up as a rule, but you can model it as an inclusive style of conversation, so people become more likely to notice who hasn't spoken yet.

To implement this practice, call on people gently and strategically. By gently, I mean make it feel and sound like an invitation - not some method of controlling participation. By strategically, I mean think through, during your preparation, who needs to be part of the discussion for each topic. Ask yourself:

Who would be great at starting the conversation?

Who is affected by the outcomes and therefore needs to be asked for their view?

Who is most likely to have a different view?

Who are the old hands who might sense whether we are making a mistake or missing something?

Check in with people at specific times. Begin each meeting with a question: "Does anyone have anything to say or ask before we begin?" Ask it deliberately and with a tone that signals that this conversation matters to you. And then wait. Pausing conveys that you're not interested in getting to someplace other than right here, right now - that this conversation matters. Don't spoil your pauses by making remarks about the lack of response or slowness of a response. People often need a few moments to reflect, find something to say, and think about the best way to express it. Just wait.

Once people realize that you are willing to pause, they'll become more aware, and when they have a question, they won't worry that they are slowing down the meeting.

High-quality conversations with broad participation allow people to get to know each other in ways that lead to friendship and collaboration. It's the act of being with other people in an attentive, caring way that helps us feel that we are all in this together. Crafting a quality experience in your meetings takes time, but it's worth it.

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How to Design Meetings Your Team Will Want to Attend

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Executive Summary Meetings aren't just about delivering results. You also want participants to leave feeling connected, valued, and fulfilled. Of course, you should still be focused on achieving the meeting outcomes but having a thoughtful meeting and a productive one don't have to be at odds. Work hard on being present.

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Remote Team Management, Startup Marketing & Growth Blog by Hubstaff

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There are a few reasons teams meet. The first one is out of habit. We put together a schedule for meeting on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. And we meet even when there's nothing to really meet about.

The second reason we meet is due to a false sense of accomplishment. We feel like if we're meeting, we're getting things done. This is far from true.

We've all had them: managers who love having meetings. Any time these managers have a new idea, they want the whole team to meet. There are also those colleagues who want to meet with no agenda, no set end time, and rarely ever any takeaways. I had two years of experience in a setting like this, which led me to the conclusion:

Only have a meeting when there's something worth sharing

The third reason we meet is because we have something worth sharing. This is the only time we should schedule a staff meeting. Knowing this is the first step to having an effective meeting agenda. The second step is preparation and effective meeting management. That's what I'll cover in this post.

From previous managers, I've learned how to do meetings the wrong way. From my current manager, Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff, I learned how to do meetings right. Dave and I only meet when there's something worth sharing, and there's always a takeaway. We also bring ideas to the meeting instead of pulling ideas from thin air and brainstorming in circles.

Even if you think you're already good at running effective team meetings, I'm sure you'll find something here to make them more worthwhile.

How to run effective team meetings

1. Have a meeting agenda with clear objectives

Meetings often stray from their initial purpose. Getting off topic is easy when there are multiple people trying to communicate with one another - especially with a remote team and video conferencing software.

In Soapbox's guide to effective meetings, it's recommended to set goals, write an agenda, collaborate ahead of time, and assign roles before the meeting even starts.

Before every meeting, create an agenda outlining the topics of discussion. Taking a few minutes to do this for each meeting makes a big difference in the outcome of your meetings. It helps you stay on track and constantly reminds you throughout the meeting about what the objective is.

There's a cool startup called Pinstriped that promises to create software that makes creating, and sticking to, meeting objectives easy. They also have a great tagline that we should all burn into our memory...

If you know of any software similar to this, definitely let everyone know about it in the comments. I have yet to find a good solution that is affordable and available.

2. Set an end time and stick to it

Creating a meeting agenda beforehand will help you determine the amount of time to allot for it. When you set a staff meeting with no end time, it's easy to get off topic even when you have an agenda and objective.

The meeting leader (see below) should solicit the help of meeting participants to keep an eye on the time. One of my colleagues at the previous company I worked for would always remind our manager about the time. If it wasn't for her, we would have been in meetings all day. That said, if you're a participant, don't be afraid to speak up and remind everyone of the time.

If you think you're constantly running over end times, you're probably spending too much time in meetings. To gain insight into how much time you're spending in meetings, you can use a time and task tracking tool like Hubstaff. Set up a task for "Meetings" and, at the end of the month, see how much you've spent in them.

Is all that time spent in meetings wasteful or worthy?

Take this guy for example. At the company he works for he's spending 20% of his time in meetings. I told him it was wasteful, and he doesn't disagree. After tracking his time to discover how much time he spent in meetings, he's asking his managers if there are any meetings he doesn't absolutely need to be in. Really good move.

3. Designate a meeting leader

Without a meeting leader, chaos will ensue every time. Your meetings must have a point person - typically the person who called the meeting - to lead a meeting and to keep things on track throughout the session.

The primary roles of the meeting leader include:

Scheduling the meeting and sending a calendar invite

Creating and disseminating the agenda

Assigning talking points or time slots to each attendee

Assigning tasks upon the conclusion of the meeting

4. Cut down on meetings

Many people call meetings without a true purpose.

Before calling a meeting, ask yourself if the information can be shared just as effectively in a different way. Some communication channels include Slack groups, email, internal memos, and project management tools.

The guy I mentioned above who is spending 20% of his time in meetings has a meeting schedule that looks like this...

Based on the post he wrote, he's having too many meetings. And as I previously mentioned, he's making the right move by asking his manager if there are meetings he can remove from his calendar.

Another way to cut down on meetings is to merge similar meetings together. This is a good move if you're a manager and talking about similar topics with different team members. For instance, could you have a group meeting rather than three individual meetings?

5. Cut down on attendees

While merging meetings can be a good idea, having too many people in a meeting can dilute the quality of information exchanged. When meetings have too many participants, you can end up with endless discussions, unclear direction, and too many opinions guiding the decision-making process.

Think of people best suited to attend the meeting, then send out meeting notes or highlights to the entire team if it's relevant.

6. Create action items and accountability

Use the ideas and decisions developed during the meeting to create action items. And when these action items are created, assign them to members of your team. Log them in your project management system and link to the meeting notes so people can refresh their memory about the meeting's details. (Typically, a project manager will follow up by assigning tasks and deadlines after the meeting, but it's on everyone in attendance to take their own notes).

7. Bring solutions to the meeting

Vasily Malishev, the founder of the app development company Messapps, said in a post about remote development that team meetings are more effective when attendees come up with solutions ahead of time.

"The way I see brainstorming," Vasily said, "is it should not be a team meeting where you come up with solutions. Instead it should be a meeting where you choose a solution. I think people should come up with solutions on their own and then discuss them. This way you get more options to choose from and generally save time.

"If we have a problem, I ask team members to come up with 5-10 solutions. At the time of the meeting people will present their solutions on Slack with a brief description of the solution and its main advantages and disadvantages. Depending on the number of solutions, we can either discuss it or maybe use a poll on Slack for everyone to vote."

Stop wasting time on too many meetings

Before putting the measures mentioned above in place, track your time for how you're currently running and attending staff meetings. Then, after following the advice here, track your time again and compare the numbers - just like Matt Ragland did at his company.

How much time did you save? I'd love to see the numbers in the comments below.

Robert Gibb

Rob manages the Hubstaff Blog and helps SaaS startups scale their content marketing initiatives. He loves working remotely and is traveling the world with We Roam in 2017. Feel free to pitch him a story for the blog and catch up with him on Twitter.

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7 Ingredients for Effective Team Meetings, Distilled from Years of Torture

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There are a few reasons teams meet. The first one is out of habit. We put together a schedule for meeting on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. And we meet even when there's nothing to really meet about. The second reason we meet is due to a false sense of accomplishment.

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Team meetings. You either love 'em or you hate 'em. Right?

I once had a manager who would sit at the head of the boardroom table every Monday morning and the first words out of her mouth were " Okay, guys, a fast game's a good game, so let's make it snappy! " (She would then skull a can of Pepsi Max!).

While we were usually always done within 30 minutes or so, it often felt very rushed and pretty superficial. On the other hand, I have also taken part in way too many meetings that were still going two hours later, discussing things that really didn't need to be raised with the whole team present.

So what's the happy medium?

How can you conduct a meeting that engages, inspires and actually achieves results? Here are five steps that might help.

1. Have a Purpose

The first thing is to have a purpose. Why is the meeting being held? Is it just because you always have one, or is there an actual reason for dragging everyone into a room or on to a call and putting the outside world on hold for an hour?

A meeting is actually a perfect opportunity to achieve a lot of things. It is a chance to catch everybody up on what is going on in the overall scheme of things. It is an opportunity to gauge how each individual is traveling and to identify potential problems. It's also a chance to reinforce your mission statement and refocus everyone on the team goals.

Team goals should actually be at the heart of every team meeting. If your goal is to make more sales, then everything discussed at the meeting should reflect this in some way.

2. Have an Agenda

If you have a purpose, you must have a meeting agenda. This is a list of the things you want to cover in the time available. Looking at your agenda will give you a rough idea of how much time you can afford to devote to each item, because time is an important element of team meetings.

They should start on time and only go for the allotted time. If some items on the agenda require more time than is available, they should be moved to the next meeting or, if urgent, a separate meeting should be held with those immediately involved.

Meetings should also be held regularly. Whether it's every Monday morning (the ideal time to plan the week ahead), or every day, they should be held when you say they will and everyone should be encouraged to arrive punctually.

Meetings that are called at the last minute or constantly postponed are an indication that you do not have respect for your team.

3. Encourage Participation

If the purpose of your meeting is relevant to those in attendance (and if it isn't, they shouldn't be there), then you want them to participate in the discussion and be involved in the decision-making.

You can do this by going around the table to get everyone's input. You can also mix up the roles, so that it is not just your jaw flapping all the time. Rotate the chair, so that those who wish to can lead the discussion.

People will become genuinely enthused about your meetings if they are encouraged to participate and can see that something is actually being achieved. They will begin to take ownership of the meetings by turning up on time and contributing to the discussion.

4. Take Minutes

Someone should be assigned to take the minutes at every meeting (ideally someone different each time). The minutes are your record of what was discussed and decided at the meeting and they help to set the agenda for the following meeting.

A copy of the minutes should be shared with (and be accessible to) everyone who attended the meeting. This serves as a reminder of what was discussed and prompts those who were assigned tasks during the meeting to set about accomplishing them before the next meeting. At RecruitLoop we use Asana to keep track of all meetings.

5. Use Technology

With the growing trend towards a more mobile workforce, holding regular face-to-face meetings is becoming less desirable for many teams. In this case, technology can be utilised to conduct virtual meetings via phone and video links.

People can participate from various locations, using their smart phones or tablets to log into a central meeting site. At RecruitLoop we either use Skype or Zoom.us for our team meetings since our team spans five countries.

If we are doing a 'virtual' meeting, even attendees in the same office log in to the technology separately so nobody gets preferential treatment.

Effective team meetings can benefit everyone by:

Keeping individual team members in the loop;

Providing valuable clues to potential problems that you can then head off; and

Helping to raise morale and engender a greater sense of teamwork.

In short, effective meetings can increase your team's productivity and your organisation's profitability.

So what are you waiting for? Name the date, send out the invites and get working on your agenda, because it's time to hold a meeting and start communicating with your team!

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How to Run Effective Team Meetings in 5 Simple Steps

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Team meetings. You either love 'em or you hate 'em. Right? I once had a manager who would sit at the head of the boardroom table every Monday morning and the first words out of her mouth were " Okay, guys, a fast game's a good game, so let's make it snappy!

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Have you ever heard that familiar phrase, "There is no "I" in team?" I am a true believer in that phrase, I think it is super important to work together as a team to achieve a common goal. But I think when it comes to meetings - whether it's a team meeting or a companywide meeting - it's important to have a "ME!" One person who leads, executes and follows up with the group. So now I say the phrase "While there is no "I" in team meeting, there is a "ME"!

When meetings are poorly managed it can be frustrating for all those involved. It can leave people with more questions than answers. Asking, "what did they do with my time?" OR "Why did we even have that meeting if we got nothing accomplished?" So I compiled a list of 5 ways to ensure your next meeting runs smoothly - feel free to work them into your meetings so you can make the most of everyone's time.

There are a lot of ways in which you can prepare your team for their meetings.

First things first: get an AGENDA!!! Agendas are vital for any meeting. You are not only preparing all the attendees with what is going to be discussed, the agenda helps you stay on track - especially for time's sake. Make sure to share the agenda with meeting participants beforehand too. This way everyone is prepared for what you are going to cover.

A key point in being prepared is to review your agenda over the course of the week and make real-time decisions based on it. For instance, if we have a packed agenda I often table items for later or identify if something needs to be a follow up item. If we have time for discussion and people are interested in it, I try to allot time for that. I am always recalculating so we stay on time, but I try not to make it feel rigid.

Another way to prepare is making sure all your technology works prior to the meeting, have agenda items reviewed and make sure any links or outside materials are easily accessible so trying to find them doesn't disrupt the meeting. There have been many times that the Wi-Fi just doesn't work, or the sound on my laptop has just decided to turn off. Being prepared with technology will help run a successful and smooth meeting for all those involved.

2. Manage Expectations (Be consistent!)

Definitely ask yourself: what do you want to come out of your meeting? If you want to have a discussion where people are engaged and focused, how will the meeting look? What will you get out of the meeting? For example, I ask our team not to bring laptops to the meeting; one, because it helps everyone concentrate by not getting distracted, and two, it also helps to create more genuine and focused conversation. Additionally, I send out discussion topics at 3PM the day prior. I do this so the team is prepared with thoughtful feedback/solutions to discuss - I expect the team to review it prior so we are all prepared and can stay focused.

When you set your expectations, and you stay consistent it not only keeps your team focused, it can help with the flow of your meeting.

3. Communication (Again - be consistent!)

Communication goes with the two items above, but how you communicate before, during and after your meeting can be crucial. Our Chief Community Officer, Amrita Bhowmick, sends us "Monday Updates" to set the team up for the week every Monday around 7am. When my email pings me around that time I know it is the email and I am inclined to check my email for two reasons. One, I want to know what the week ahead looks like, and two, make sure anything that has a deadline is added to my to do list. The best part about this is she is consistent!

Communicate prior to your meeting. Like I mentioned, I send an email out at around 3PM every Wednesday before our Thursday morning meeting. The team is then expected to review the night/morning prior so they come prepared and we can run the meeting within the hour time frame

Communication during the meeting. It can be important to manage conversations during the meeting if we need to move the team along. Bring it back to center, it's ok to interrupt people and just let them know, "we are going down a rabbit hole" or "we can table this and get back to it at the next team meeting".

Communication after the meeting. Similar to Amrita's Monday morning email, I send out a follow up email to our team on Friday mornings around 7AM to communicate any follow ups or action items that may need their attention. I outline what we discussed, not extensively but enough for the team to get a framework for what they need to remember or complete.

All these strategies that fall under communication are fabulous but they must come with a consistent leader. Remain consistent in how you communicate and your team will not only be prepared, but your team will get used to having high expectations from you and will likely align their conduct at meetings with your efficient style and practices.

Being thoughtful about your attendees' experience at the meeting is also vital. Have you ever been in a meeting when someone is having a side conversation? It's so hard to stay on track while that's happening! When you're aware of these potential pitfalls and prevent them from occuring, you create an experience for others in which they can fully digest the content of the meeting.

There are further considerations if you have people joining the meeting via computer or phone. I have to say there are many times that we can forget about the people who have called into the meeting because they are often silent. However, they may have something important to say and they can't seem to get a word in because there is so much great conversation happening in the office. Remain aware of those on the phone, so they feel heard too. Additionally, keep in mind that people who call into the meeting may have challenges hearing, and therefore understanding. Repeating what others say can be a good practice too.

For people who tend to stay quiet, even when they have something of value to say, you can proactively ask them if they have anything to add. Even if they may not, you'll know that they've had a chance to speak and then you can redirect the discussion to someone or something else.

Lastly, be extra aware of those instances that cause people to get sidetracked, have side conversations, or go down a rabbit hole. Sometimes you can avoid them, but if you can't, don't be afraid to interrupt to bring it back to the agenda and have everyone stay focused. This certainly can be challenging, especially if everyone is talking over each other. If you want, feel free to use a bell. Yes, I said a bell. While for some meetings a megaphone might seem necessary (haha), a simple tap of a bell can help bring the meeting back together in a polite but firm way.

5. Own ownership

Owning the meeting may be the hardest of all these practices. You have to make it clear who owns the meeting, who is the leader, who sets the precedence on how the meeting will go. Get there early enough so that you set the tone, when you're late you create another dynamic which can set others off. If you have all your technology set up and you're following all the listed ideas above you are owning your meeting.

Don't be afraid to keep the conversation focused on your meeting objectives (which the agenda will help you do), and while you want to make sure that you have the power you don't want to be rude, rigid or chose sides. It's hard to try to shush everyone up, especially when someone is passionate about a topic or when something is funny and everyone is laughing and joking. It's okay to ring the bell on them, but don't get upset at them either. We are all human.

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Leading a Meeting: 5 skills to help lead an effective team meeting

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Have you ever heard that familiar phrase, "There is no "I" in team?" I am a true believer in that phrase, I think it is super important to work together as a team to achieve a common goal. But I...

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Effective meetings are not only integral to achieve team goals and successful completion of tasks, but also are reflective overall of team functioning. They also allow for open conversation that draws upon each employee's knowledge, skills, and perspectives to solve problems and to support one another in achieving the team's collective goals.

Here we share with you some key tips to have an effective team meeting.

Purpose

The first thing is to have a purpose. Why is the meeting being held? This could be that you hold monthly team meetings to determine where everyone in the team is or these could be quarterly meetings that are held to discuss the business, goals and tasks.

A team meeting is a perfect opportunity to achieve a lot of things. It is a chance to catch everybody up on what is going on in the overall scheme of things. It is an opportunity to gauge how each individual is traveling and to identify potential problems. It's also a chance to reinforce your mission statement and refocus everyone on the team goals.

Team goals should actually be at the heart of every team meeting. If your goal is to make more sales, then everything discussed at the meeting should reflect this in some way.

Set the Time and Date

Plan ahead and choose a time that suits all of your team, and think about how this impacts on customers - ensure you plan for that. We use a shared calendar in our office, which means we can all see what everyone has on - this is great for planning as we can book meetings at a time we know everyone is available. If you have large teams, or work shift patterns, not everyone will be able to attend so ensure you think about how you can share this message with all your team. In these cases, you might want to vary when you hold the meetings to ensure everyone has a fair opportunity to attend. For example, setting a day of the last Friday of the month will not work if you have staff who never work a Friday.

It is good practice to allow as much notice as possible for your meeting to allow your employees time to schedule their work oad around this.

Agenda

We also see a lot of good practice with some of our clients, where they send everyone an agenda along with the date the meeting is to be held. This allows everyone to know what will be discussed, and you can also invite agenda items prior to sending this out.

You can also let your people know that following the meeting, there will be some action points, which you can share with the team - this gets them involved and allows you to implement some actions!

Consistency

It is important to be consistent and stick to the date and time. The last thing you want is your people to rearrange their work schedules, make plans for the meeting, only for it to be cancelled at the last minute. We understand that sometimes things can happen operationally, but cancelling team meetings sends out a message that your people are not important which can lead to poor engagement.

Assign a Note Taker

A common mistake committed during team meetings is that no one takes note of the discussions and agreed actions. When this happens, no one remembers what he or she is supposed to do and nothing is accomplished.

To avoid this, why not nominate someone from the team to take minutes or notes of the key points and these should be sent to all team members to remind them of their tasks and responsibilities? This also helps you share the messages with those that couldn't attend the meeting and gives you a tool to follow up with people.

Share all information

A team meeting allows you time to discuss what's going on within the business and allows you to share all key operational things that are occurring.

No matter how trivial you think it is, it is important to share all information about the business with your employees - this could include any planned recruitment, people who are leaving, special offers - involve your team and don't allow a culture of "no one told me" to creep into your business.

Encourage Feedback

We've seen some team meetings where it's the manager or Director sharing information, which is great, but there's no scope to get feedback. Meetings do not only need to be a download of information; you should allow your employees the chance to give feedback. You could also ask for feedback on the formats of the meeting, for instance what could be changed - time, frequency content etc. If you give people the opportunity to contribute, you'll get more out of it.

Many managers make the mistake of assuming that the way they conduct team meetings is effective but it never hurts to ask people what they think.

Key Actions

Team meetings are nothing if employees don't know their key actions. Before you close a meeting, it important to assign all the key actions that are required to be completed by the next meeting and each employee should know the role they have to play to ensure these actions are completed and when. Every employee must have a clear understanding of what he or she must do.

You should conduct periodic checks with your people to see where they are at with things, rather than leave this to the next meeting. This ensures that the team stays on track and if there are delays, these can be addressed immediately. It's also another opportunity to open up communication channels with your people.

1-1 Meetings

You can also follow up by arranging 1-1's with your team. We'll share some tips on effective 1-1s next week, but these allow you the opportunity to ask what they thought of the team meeting and also to obtain specific concerns they have that they feel they could not discuss during the team meeting.

Your Turn

What do you find challenging about team meetings? Do you have some good practice you can share?

Join the conversation and let us know your thoughts.

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The HR Booth | How to conduct an effective team meeting

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Effective meetings are not only integral to achieve team goals and successful completion of tasks, but also are reflective overall of team functioning. They also allow for open conversation that draws upon each employee's knowledge, skills, and perspectives to solve problems and to support one another in achieving the team's collective goals.

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Team meetings. Weekly meetings. Stand-up meetings. Monday morning meetings. You love them? You love them not? Well, you definitely not love them. Right?
It's Monday. You are already pissed with the thought that it is Monday. Having the blues? The start of the workweek brings feeling of anxiety, sadness, depression, and laziness. And there you land on your office table, trying to settle down, and what you hear, " Meeting in the conference room in next 2 minutes ". Do you fear this? Do you feel restless during meetings?

Simplify the way you manage your projects and teams.Switch to ProofHub

This is not the case just with Monday meetings. When it comes to weekly meetings or daily meetings, the feeling is same for many. There are good meetings and there are bad meetings. And bad meetings on a bad day are even worse. But first of all, let's talk about the three main aspects that makes a meeting effective?
Objectives are met
Consumed minimum amount of time
A sensible process to meeting
If the above objectives aren't met in your meeting, there is something that is being overlooked and need to worked on. People are often susceptive that if the meetings are not effective, then what is the point of holding them?

Reasons to have team meetings

I already came across your silent question - what is the reason to have effective team meetings when they are so frustrating? You might want to get rid of these team meetings as much as possible. But for sure meetings cannot be avoided because of some pretty good reasons.

1. To provide information

- Those scheduled team meetings are a perfect example to provide the right information to all members and to make sure that all the main points are explained.

2. To allow for feedback and discussion

- Feedback is not the same as information, it is a reaction to a performance to provide more improvement. Feedback is usually carried forward with further discussions to bring fruitful results.

3. To build/strengthen a team

- A team meeting activity will develop interpersonal and organizational skills to instill a sense of togetherness and commitment.

4. To promote team collaboration

- Team meetings will not only release important information amongst team but will also be helpful in team collaboration which is an important part of workplace.

At ProofHub, we have weekly meetings, everybody gathers in the conference room and nobody seems to be restless. The team leaders have the power to engage and retain the staff and do it well. How do we make the meetings effective and more successful?

From our experiences, here are 5 tips to make meetings effective and fun.

1. Make a connection with everyone in the room

What happens during the meetings in your office? Is the agenda shared? The manager or team leader starts the meeting by reading the agenda and the team tilts their head down having no connection with what is being shared. Meetings are meant to be for face-to-face discussion and not for sharing data. You can share the data with the team in advance so that everyone is aware of it and discuss the things in the meetings. This will make a connection with everyone in the room and will push their minds for brainstorming. This will also save time and will keep everyone on the same page.

2. Add some fun

Meetings and fun? Do you like the combination? Yes, you can add some fun and excitement to your meetings by doing some fun team meeting activity. When a game will be introduced in a meeting this will be like a surprise for the team and they will look forward to meetings in future. A few team meeting games like brain writing, the anti-problem, trading cards, design the box and much more will bring something out of the ordinary boring meetings. Or you can ask someone to share their success story or sponsor some engaging material. You can have weekly/monthly team award during the meeting. These team meeting activity ideas will break up the monotony and engage everyone during the meeting.

3. Link the agenda with your mission

Effective team meetings are not meant just for discussing reports, deadlines, and motions. Many times meetings are often disconnected from the mission and vision of the company. As your company's mission statement holds the key business objectives it needs to be fed directly into your meeting agenda. Every meeting should have a mission related the discussion to keep team members aware of what they are doing and what they have to do for the growth of the company.

4. Encourage Participation

One of the reasons that team members are not participating in the meetings is that they are not aware of the purpose of the meeting. The purpose of your meeting should be relevant and known to all the team members. This will encourage them to participate in the discussions during a meeting and be involved in the decision-making. Give each of them a chance to lead the discussion and put forward their points. If the team is encouraged to participate, they will be genuinely excited about the meetings and will see it in a positive way contributing to the discussion.

5. Make the meeting actionable

So, you have discussed every bit of strategies with the team, what's next? At the end of the meeting give a chance to every team member to put forward their new goals in short. This will provide a recap to them and also you will know what information is retained by them. At the end of each meeting, the managers can also ask certain questions like,

"What are the tasks to be done in the next week?"
"What new strategies did you learn from this meeting."

Ending your meeting with such simple questions will make sure that responsibilities and timelines are clear.

TOO MANY MEETINGS?
It is of no use to bounce from meeting to meetings with no productive results. You probably need to follow the ways of running an effective meeting. Follow the right structure and order, have a solid objective in mind, and a commitment and you are well on your way to great meetings. Try to avoid some of the meeting conducts to keep annoyance away from your team. You will soon gain a reputation for running efficient meetings.

Simplify the way you manage your projects and teams. Switch to ProofHub

If you liked this post, you are going to love these as well -

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5 Tips for running the team meetings most effectively

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Team meetings. Weekly meetings. Stand-up meetings. Monday morning meetings. You love them? You love them not? Well, you definitely not love them. Right? It's Monday. You are already pissed with the thought that it is Monday. Having the blues? The start of the workweek brings feeling of anxiety, sadness, depression, and laziness.

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Team meetings are significant and inevitable. They ensure the team's projects are on time and on track and that everyone is on the same page. Team meetings make clear that everyone is working toward the same goal.

However, statistics show another side of the story. Generally, employees end up wasting approximately 31 hours each month in unproductive meetings.

Even at the management level, middle managers waste up to 35% of their time and upper managers waste up to 50% of theirs in meetings.

This being said, meetings are important. But how do you make them productive and effective, too?

We may have some tips to help you along the way.

Have an Agenda

While this may seem like unnecessary information - or a given - it may surprise you that more than 63% of meetings have no planned agenda.

With no pre-decided agenda, meetings can quickly become a waste of time. From conversations going off topic to discussing items with the least priority, a mismanaged meeting can do more harm than good.

A good method by which to stick to the agenda is by outlining the details of the meeting and sharing them with employees beforehand. This keeps the meeting's discussions on track in a productive manner.

Creating an agenda also allows you to assign each employee a piece of the presentation, helping employees feel useful and focused.

Brainstorming Sessions

While it's good to have discussions outlined, it can also be effective to leave a time slot open in your meetings to brainstorm.

Employees have unique skillsets, thought processes and talents, and this gives your team members the opportunity to feel heard.

Employee disengagement is an unfortunate fact; a whopping 70% of U.S. workers report not feeling engaged enough at the workplace.

Thus, encouraging employees to speak up just may do the trick. Brainstorming sessions can help employees share ideas based on their unique skillsets.

These sessions can enable employees to voice ideas and issues that may otherwise seem invisible, which may contribute valuable information to the business and lead to finding unlikely solutions.

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

Visuals are an integral part of every meeting.

Did you know that over 90% of information conveyed to the brain is visual? Also, your brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than it does words.

You may want to consider these statistics next time you arrange a meeting.

Don't just talk over the matters using text on slides or paper handouts. Make use of graphs, pictures, and even videos to discuss progress.

Keep It Short

Long meetings can make employees tired and distracted.

According to research, the time span for paying attention is between 10 and 18 minutes. For this reason, you may want to keep meetings to, on average, 15 minutes or less.

Short meetings help focus only on the issues without giving employees the luxury of time to get side-tracked.

Did you know that Yahoo's Marissa Mayer schedules only 10-minute meetings?

Online Meetings

Many modern companies have branch offices scattered in various locations.

Though face-to-face meetings are effective, traveling between branches can waste time and resources.

According to Verizon Conferencing, face-to-face meetings that require travel may be seven times more expensive than virtual meetings.

While you may consider the option of conference calls, you may also want to know that 65% of employees regularly do other work during a conference call.

This, in turn, causes loss of focus and wasted time.

Rather than conference calls, it can be useful to engage in video conferencing, allowing employees to meet face-to-face without actually being in the same place.

A good solution: online meetings.

Better yet, invest in online meeting management software.

A meeting management app has the ability to streamline multiple processes, from managing attendees and vendors to deciding budgets and schedules. It can also provide multi-party video conferencing and content sharing.

Some can even arrange your notes into professional meeting minutes and help you send them to the team. Meeting management apps can be the solution to nearly all meeting productivity issues.

Do you have any tips to make meetings better and more effective? Share them with us, in the comments below.

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5 Tips for More Effective Team Meetings - DZone Agile

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Team meetings are significant and inevitable. They ensure the team's projects are on time and on track and that everyone is on the same page. Team meetings make clear that everyone is working toward the same goal. However, statistics show another side of the story.

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How many team meetings do you attend each week? How exciting and interesting are they? My guess is "not very". But meetings don't need to be dull. Here are some of the more interesting ways companies across the world bring an extra dimension to their meetings.

1. Using odd meeting times can help staff remember more easily, and combat lateness / absence. Washington-based employee engagement software provider TINYPulse starts its daily staff meeting at 8:48 a.m.

2. Introduce novel ways to engage and connect with staff. Every Thursday, baby food maker Plum Organics gives everyone colouring books and holds a creative-thinking meeting where staff colour, talk, and decompress. Research suggests that colouring helps promote active listening.

3. Address the most important issues first - be like Stephen Covey and make sure you cover the most salient issues early on to ensure you have an effective, fruitful meeting.

4. Connection before content - ask probing questions to each other to get people out of their comfort zones and completely engaged. Take a leaf from the meetings manual of software provider LivePerson, who ask each other: "What are your doubts about something you're working on?"

5. Games & sports can be used to get people having fun and ideas flowing. Mobile game publisher Genera Games have their meetings whilst playing basketball.

6. Don't allow the same topics to be endlessly rehashed - create a visual aid to stop people rehashing old topics. Staff at security management software provider Brivo hold up ping-pong bats emblazoned with the phrase "no rehash" to discourage repetition.

7. Q&A sessions can drive engagement and get contentious issues and questions out in the open. If no one has a question, be like e-commerce company Etailz cofounder Josh Neblett and stare at them until they think of one.

8. Punish interruptions. Prevent lateness like Darrell Gehrt, vice president of Inquisium, by forcing people to sing when they enter late. During meetings at Keller-Williams Realty, anyone whose phone rings must make a donation to the company's charity. This cuts down on interruptions during meetings, and when it happens, it supports the corporate nonprofit. Win win!

9. Make sure attendees leave with actionable tasks to complete. No one should leave a meeting without knowing what they have to complete going forward. At Apple, every project component or task has a DRI - a Directly Responsible Individual whose name goes next to all the agenda items they are responsible for. This way there's rarely any confusion about who should be getting what done.

10. Have a clear end time. Constraints breed creativity and setting a clear end time will ensure you cover what's needed. The staff at Tripping.com, a search engine for holiday rentals, sets a stopwatch for 30 minutes at the start of each meeting. If the meeting goes on for longer, the person who called the meeting has to put $5 in the team beer jar. Cheers!

11. Limit the people involved - Google strictly limits meetings to 10 people to avoid confusion and good ideas being lost in the crowd. And Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is famous for his " two pizza teams " - if two pizzas isn't enough to feed everyone at the meeting, it's too big.

12. Keep meetings short - incentivise people into keep meetings a short length, and create punishments for when people drag them on. At digital design agency O3 World, the boardroom is hooked up to Roombot, an app they created. It reads everyone's Google Calendar and warns when it's time to finish. It also dims the lights in the final minutes of the meeting.

13. Agile teams champion the daily standup - also called the daily scrum. The whole team meets every day for a status update, standing up to keep the meeting short. Meet where the work happens, not in a meeting room.

14. Make the most of new staff - sometimes entry-level workers can have the freshest ideas. Sean Higby of Newsala believes in getting junior colleagues heavily involved in meetings to generate new approaches & ideas.

15. Be like Christopher Frank of American Express and start your meeting by asking each person to define in five words or less the problem to be solved. If the answers are inconsistent or too long, you're probably not focused on the same problem. Work towards clearly articulating the goal.

16. Be prepared to challenge & be challenged - it's OK to ask tough questions and get contentious issues and problems out in the open.

17. Don't wait for meetings to make decisions, and if meetings are really necessary make sure they happen as soon as possible. As Danny Sim says in this article: "Decisions should never wait for a meeting. Otherwise, the velocity of the company is slowed to its meeting schedule."

Or, if none of those work, be like productivity software maker Asana - they have a no-meetings-on-Wednesday rule, ensuring that team members get at least one schedule-free day: a large block of time to focus on heads-down work, without having to fit it in between meetings.

There really is no excuse for running a boring team meeting. Don't just go through the motions - shake things up and see where it takes you.

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Some ideas for your next team meeting | Creative Huddle

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How many team meetings do you attend each week? How exciting and interesting are they? My guess is "not very". But meetings don't need to be dull. Here are some of the more interesting ways companies across the world bring an extra dimension to their meetings. 1.

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Hint: Give a Damn

This is a snapshot of a typical day for me:

Perhaps a bit more crowded than usual, but not by much.

I am a manager.

At various points in my career I have wielded pens, launch plans, video editing software, or other tactical tools - today I wield meetings. I tell people this sometimes, and they look at me with a sort of sympathetic nostalgia. Meetings are the WORST, they say. More often than I should admit, I respond, "yes, they can be."

The part that I leave out is the back half of that sentence. They can be, if you misuse them.

I have misused my fair share of meetings in my career so far. It's never because of poor intentions. It's always because I ran out of time to properly prepare for them.

It's a time management thing.

I'm working on it.

I've also had good meetings. Great meetings. Meetings that are the single point of difference between a project that fails and one that excels.

Meetings are a skill just like writing, coding, or anything else learned through practice, observation and an undying, unwavering desire to suck less.

When you spot someone good at them, you sit up and pay attention. I'm writing this post because I recently spotted someone good at them -  Mark Kilens, VP of HubSpot Academy.

Every month Mark holds a team meeting to ground his cohort of twenty-four professors, content creators, project managers, editors etc. in the progress they've made and the challenges ahead. Team meetings like this happen every day across HubSpot in a variety of ways. Mark's are just really good. Here's why.

1. No laptops. Not only that, there are no phones on the table. No buzzing, no slacking, no anxiety spiking prompts to take your head out of the game. Everyone seems to have recognized how expensive it is to take that many people out of their work for a meeting and is intent on getting the value out of it.

It's a fascinating thing when everyone in a room is present. It's infectious. And it makes you realize just how polluting it is in other meetings when someone checks-out of the conversation to glance down at their phone. Even if it's only one person, it shatters the focus of the room.

2. Set a timer. Everyone has had the experience of a conversation running off the rails in a meeting. Running over time may seem like a small digression in the moment but it snowballs. Eventually topics get bumped and new meetings have to be called to cover everything you didn't have time for previously.

Mark breaks meetings up into smaller sub-topics and sets a very visible timer that everyone, including he, adheres to.

3. Share the stage. Every meeting is split up into subtopics led by different members of the team. These subtopics aren't chosen for the sake of letting so-and-so speak, they're chosen based on relevance to the larger team and the goals they're going after. Additionally, when he is speaking, he breaks up his own monologue to ask people in the room for examples of what he's discussing or contrary experiences.

More on that next...

4. Be inclusive. It's often cited that meetings are an extroverts opportunity to shine and and introverts opportunity to sit in the corner and type quietly to themselves. Whether it is deliberate or natural, Mark manages to pull everyone into the discussion in ways that feel productive and not forced. He mixes quick questions (e.g., "Who can tell us what an OKR is") with guided ones, "Meghan, you had an experience with this recently - what was that like." His meetings aren't dominated by a few vocal people, but shared by all.

5. Ties the team's work to company goals. When you are immersed in your own work it's hard to keep your view from becoming myopic. Mark does a nice job of connecting the dots between the short-term achievements of the team and the broader company goals. The kicker here is he does this in every single meeting, not just at the beginning of the year. This is a constant reminder of why the team does what it does.

6. Interject breaks. The Academy Team meetings are long - not for the faint of heart - but they're thorough and every piece is well planned and valuable. Mark structures his meeting agenda so there are short-periods of focus followed by shifts or breaks. These shifts in focus and breaks in attention play a big role in keeping productivity high.

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How to Run Incredible Team Meetings - ThinkGrowth.org

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This is a snapshot of a typical day for me: Perhaps a bit more crowded than usual, but not by much. I am a manager. At various points in my career I have wielded pens, launch plans, video editing software, or other tactical tools - today I wield meetings.

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Meetings are difficult at the best of times.

There are few meetings where the participants would not rather be doing something (anything!) else and whose minds are not wandering on to more exciting things.

Meetings are typically longer than they need to be, littered with irrelevant and tangential conversation, high in self-importance, and low on productivity.

Nevertheless, they are a necessary part of cooperative labor.

Just as a ship requires rudder, so to successful businesses need the inescapable concept of a hierarchy, and those hierarchies require cooperation and synergy in order to function.

And so, it should not surprise us to learn that inefficient meetings contribute to lower productivity and in poor collaboration.

If you want to maintain a healthy and collaborative environment for a meeting, here are the seven deadly sins you'll need to overcome.

1. One-Upmanship

Reality Check: There will always be someone in the room more competent than you.

Irritation: There will also be someone in the room who suspects they're more important than you.

If you had pneumonia, this person has had double pneumonia.

If you have written a 2,000-word paper on why content marketing matters, there will be someone else in the room who has written a 3,000-word paper on the same subject - and they'll make sure you know about it.

Kind of person I have in mind is the kind of person who is always looking to outdo someone else in the room.

This search for significance, when verbalized, is so destructive to collaboration.

Tell such a person that you are in 10 acres and they will tell you about the time they owned 20.

Mention that you've been turning up at 7:30 each morning to get your work done, and this person will no doubt want you - and everyone else in the room - that they have been known to turn up at 6 o'clock.

Overcoming this culture in a meeting is not something you can do with a hint or sudden suggestions.

People need to be told - whether directly or indirectly, and in the midst of the group so as not to alienate any one member, - that the point of the meeting is not for them to grandstand and show for their excellence.

Dishing out a few examples like the one I have given above is usually enough to make most sycophants pause, even if it's only for a moment.

And, at that moment, the rest of us have an opportunity to contribute without fear of being doused in the watery words of another's one-upmanship.

2. Smartphone Addiction

Is it OK for people to be tapping away on their smartphones during a meeting?

My answer is no.

It's usually disruptive and often downright disrespectful.

I will make a couple exceptions.

If someone in the meeting requests a piece of information that could be easily gathered on the spot by using the device.

If people are using their device as a calendar and organizing events that are relevant to the agenda.

Beyond that, smartphones, tablets, and laptops should be put away.

This constant need to busy ourselves with trivialities or worse still, engage in conversations via the phone when we're being spoken to directly in a meeting, is counterproductive.

It's rude, it's annoying, and the best way to deal with it is via a direct conversation with everyone in the room
Rule #1: When we meet we put our phones down, and we only pick them up for the sake of the agenda.
3. Off-Topic Conversation

Few things are more painful in a meeting then redundant or irrelevant conversation.

I'm talking about the kind of meeting where discussion about administrative budgets is railroaded by someone who wants to talk about the cost of the canteen lunch at their kid's school.

This self-important desire to be at the center of every conversation is a huge weakness in otherwise productive meetings.

From a survey of senior managers in a range of industries in the United States:

It's no wonder that so many employees, especially those in senior management, find meetings to be an unproductive and miserable experience.

You're talking about ways to measure client-based outcomes and in a bizarre twist of reality, this triggers someone in the room to start talking about the time they fell off their bike.

Want to have a fruitful meeting? Cut the storytelling down to only that which illustrates the point at hand.

4. Lack of Oxygen

Just as important as the conversation and culture are the physical environments where the meetings are held.

How many have sat in stuffy, windowless offices yawning through long speeches and wishing they were somewhere else?

The physical nature of the workplace has a real impact on staff job satisfaction and retention.

People need air to breathe in order to think. They need some visual distance to dream and plan.

Lack of oxygen and a lack of light are not conducive to healthy meeting practices or positive and engaging outcomes for workers.

If you don't want your stuff to wither like a hothouse flower give them air, light, and water.

5.Narcissistic Interjection

Some people cannot help but continuously interrupt the thoughts of others.

We have a rule in my house - one which I hope my kids will cultivate throughout their lives.

That rule is: Don't be the person in the center of any room unless it's absolutely necessary, and try and be the last person to speak.

But you get these people, lacking self-control, who have to interject.

It's not that they want to respond to every statement or question. These people don't even let you finish. They are interjecting to either finish your sentence or correct it or steer the conversation to something of greater interest to themselves.

This kind of self-absorbed narcissism is never appreciated.

It is rarely helpful and tends only to exhaust for the rest of us who have to endure your constant interruptions to our thoughts and our speech.

Whether it's true impatience or self-absorption really doesn't matter.

The effect is entirely negative full stop it undermines.

The creative expression of others and treat the thoughts and ideas of others as unimportant.

6. Lateness

You know who you are. You couldn't turn up in time to save yourself.

Why?

Because your mind resembles the sock drawer of Krusty the Clown.

As my mother used to say, "Unpunctuality is the sign of a disordered mind."

Many of these late-comers add insult to injury by also being excuse-makers.

The bus, the alarm, the flat, the kid.

There is something ugly about making excuses in order to justify yourself.

How about a simple apology.

You were late.

Apologize, get over it, and get on with it.

Don't hold up our meeting with your long-winded explanations and self-justifications on why you can't keep a schedule.

7. Pessismism

Ah, the pessimist. It doesn't matter who had the idea or how suitable it is for the occasion; the pessimist will always see the downside and aim to bring everybody else down with him.

Playful: "I thought we could have a hangi for the staff Christmas party."

Painful: "Hmm, yes but we must consider the hygiene implications of sticking our beef in the dirt."

Smiler: "I think some plants in the office might improve the ambiance."

Sour: "Well I'm not watering them. Who's going to water them? These ideas always end up in the compost."

Happy: "I thought that now might be a good time to audit our marketing budget, and look for ways we could increase our marketing efficiency."

Hung-up: "We're all gonna die."

Nothing brings down the tone or enthusiasm of a meeting quite like the pessimist.

Sure, there needs to be a series of checks and balances, I understand that. But these miserable folk and not only down on themselves and counterproductive they tend to reduce the productivity of everybody else around them.

Conclusion

Poor meeting practices and sub-par meeting cultures like the ones outlined above are detrimental to creativity and innovation.

They tend to inhibit collaboration and foster resentment within the company structure.

Knowing this and identifying the roadblocks to effective meetings is half the battle won.

The other half of the battle is getting everyone to ditch their self-important agenda in favor creating a positive and productive work environment for everyone involved.
More Agency Resources: Featured Image and In-post Photos: Created by David Trounce using Pixabay, Pexels CC0 License, Wiki Commons and Canva, April 2018.

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The 7 Deadly Sins of Staff Team Meetings

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Meetings are difficult at the best of times. There are few meetings where the participants would not rather be doing something (anything!) else and whose minds are not wandering on to more exciting things. Meetings are typically longer than they need to be, littered with irrelevant and tangential conversation, high in self-importance, and low on productivity.

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Team meetings are renowned for being boring and, to many employees, a waste of time.

In fact, one survey shows that over 75% of meeting participants are annoyed by meetings they deem unnecessary, and many more will agree they find them boring, even if it's just from time to time.

So, as a meeting host in your business, it's up to you to spice things up and bring a spark that will keep everybody engaged. To help you get started, here are seven techniques you can use.

One of the most common meeting tactics to use is known as 'breakout groups'. This is a type of meeting where you'll introduce a certain point or subject and then break the teams up into groups to discuss it. As you can imagine, this is ideal for brainstorming activities.

"Try to split up groups of people, so each group is as diverse as possible. At the end of the session, bring the teams back together and discuss all your points as a team," shares Mary Parker, an HR Manager for UK Writings.

You may have heard of team-building days, but there's no reason why you can't bring a team-building exercise into your meetings to bring everyone together and to get the mind focused. This is a great way to boost employee morale, build company culture and make the team socially aware.

You could give your team a puzzle or play a simple Q & A game. Team meetings don't have to be completely work-related either - they could solely focus on the team building aspect and be used as ten-minute introductions to get everybody engaged.

One of the best ways to bring new life into your meetings is by creating a visual presentation, such as a PowerPoint. This adds a visual element to your meetings and is a great way to share information in an easily digestible format.

You can add graphics, images, videos, graphs, text, and any other form of data or media that will help to keep the participants of your meeting engaged. Aim to produce high-quality presentations for your team meetings. Here are some tools that can help:

Grammarix & Studydemic
These are two online tools you can use to check the grammar in your presentation.

Revieweal
This website reviews copywriting services that can create content for your presentation, as recommended by the HuffingtonPost inWrite My Essay article.

Let's Go and Learn & My Writing Way
These blogs have a tonne of writing guides you can follow to improve your general writing skills.

Australian Reviewer
This is an online writing community where you can meet writers from around the world to improve your skills.

Cite It In
This is a free online tool to help you add citations, references and quotes to your presentation professionally.

Writing Populist & Academadvisor
These are two services that can help you to edit the content of your slides to perfection.

Do you always hold your meetings in the same room? Why not mix things up by changing your meeting's venue? Perhaps you could book another room in your office building. You could try meeting in a huddle space or taking your team to a nearby café or quiet place to sit.

"One of the more popular meeting places that people enjoy is going outside. Not only does this give your team a bit of sunlight and fresh air, but it also helps to break up the day, keeps your participants engaged and focused and makes a nice change from a boring meeting room," explains Sarah Cattle, an HR Manager for UKServicesReviews.

If your meetings are dragging on and on, it's only natural that people are going to get bored, switch off and become disinterested in what's being said. That being said, it's so much better for you and the rest of your team to keep things short and engaging.

This means if you're having a meeting, it's better to stick to a selection of topics and subjects that you're talking about, rather than trying to go on and on and cram in absolutely everything you have to say. As a rule of thumb, try and keep your meetings to around 30 minutes maximum.

When your team comes into your meeting, have you ever paid attention to how they seat themselves?

Typically, you'll see people sit in the same places and next to the same people. This is great, but if people are mucking around, or the same people are hiding at the back trying not to be involved, this will contribute to an unsuccessful meeting.

Instead, try mixing people up and getting them sitting next to people, and in places, that they wouldn't normally sit. This is great for brainstorming team meetings, especially when group discussion is implemented.

This is only scratching the surface when it comes to ways to enhance and revitalize your meetings with what works for you.

To help you get off on the right foot, here are some extra touches you can add to bring energy into your meetings, and to make them more fun:

Get a different employee to bring in food for each meeting and vote best food every month

Break your group into small groups for discussion (mix people up)

Every time someone 'crushes' an idea, get another member to throw a soft toy at them saying, "Let's give it a "

Be charismatic when talking

Make eye contact with the people in your meeting

Concentrate on your body language

Spotlight employees with rewards and recognition

Whether your hosting team meetings, teleconferences or office workshops, it's important to always add your own flair to effectively engage employees. The next time you have a team meeting, make sure you have these 7 tips in your back pocket.

Are you having trouble engaging your employees? Check out this guide highlighting four ways to start measuring the results of your engagement programs.

Do you have any thoughts on this article? Share your comments below.

About the Author Mary Walton is a business writer and blogger at Simple Grad, read her Boom Essays review there. Also, she writes for the Huffington Post (one of her most popular posts there is Buy an Essay article).

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7 Fun Ways to Host Team Meetings | The Engage Blog

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Team meetings are renowned for being boring and, to many employees, a waste of time. In fact, one survey shows that over 75% of meeting participants are annoyed by meetings they deem unnecessary, and many more will agree they find them boring, even if it's just from time to time.

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You get what you tolerate.

I've heard this adage many times when complaining about my dog's behavior, and occasionally regarding my children too. The person sharing that wisdom is telling me that my dog's and my children's poor behavior persists because I allow it to; because I'm creating the conditions where that kind of thing can occur not just once, but repeatedly.

Recently we hosted a webinar on how to increase engagement during team meetings, and we asked people who registered about the number one meeting engagement problem they hoped we could help solve.

Several registrants asked about how to deal with the person who won't stop talking, making it hard for anyone else to get a word in. Several others asked about how to get people to show up on time, or even to show up at all.

I shared some specific techniques for helping with these situations in the webinar, but as more and more of these replies kept coming in, I couldn't help but hear that adage echo in the back of my head.

You get what you tolerate.

While I believe that's true to a degree, I never found it particularly useful!

I didn't appreciate it when people told me to just "stop tolerating" undesirable behavior from my kids and my dog. I wanted advice that went beyond "Well, don't let them do that!" I gritted my teeth, rolled my eyes, and admitted that yes, sure, I'm tolerating this behavior I guess - but what else am I supposed to do?!

That's the challenge faced by many meeting leaders when it comes to the long-winded participant. How exactly are you supposed to "not tolerate it" when that one person-let's call him Fred-decides to keep talking about his pet project? Do you just cut him off? Do you kick him out? Do you follow the lead of our U.S. Senators and hurl a talking stick at him?

Not likely.

You can do a lot with how you structure and lead your meeting to minimize this problem. The facilitation literature includes all kinds of tips specifically for this issue.

For most people, though, redesigning every meeting just to work around Fred isn't realistic.

Instead, I recommend considering a more direct approach by creating team ground rules for your meetings.

Ground rules give everyone a chance to manage Fred-including Fred! When you work with your team to establish an expectation that everyone in meetings will keep their comments brief and relevant, you can all hold each other to it.

Ground rules give you a tool you can use when someone goes too long. This means the burden and the power to manage the conversation falls not just on the meeting leader - ground rules give everyone on the team a tool they can use!

It's important to remember that the people who take more than their fair share of meeting time may not realize the impact they have on others. They may feel that no one else wants to speak, and it's up to them to carry the conversation. This is certainly what happens with me and my middle child. He's at that age where he doesn't talk to his parents much, so I find myself just jabbering on to fill the vacuum.

Over-talkers may not be able to sense social queues well. I know several people who will admit they can't "read" other people, and they actually appreciate a bit of subtle coaching to help them avoid unintentionally upsetting others.

Finally, they may be waiting for someone else to acknowledge them, and will just keep talking until someone does. This can happen a lot when people are nervous or worked up - they keep talking until someone assures them that they've been heard.

Another possibility: they could be the type that thinks out loud, getting carried away in their own verbal thought process without really noticing the minutes ticking by. This is my particular foible; it's taken me a lot of years to clue in to my husband's impatient toe tapping as he waits for me to get to the point!

Or finally, it's possible they could be jerks who like to dominate everyone else with their inane babble! On balance, though, this last option isn't the most likely.

Whatever the reason, when you set a clear expectation about the kind of behavior the group wants in meetings, you can talk openly about that behavior in the group. In other words, when you start talking about what you want, it becomes easier for everyone to talk about what they want. If you're uncomfortable with the idea of suggesting ground rules to your team, please consider how obvious that last sentence is.

Then once you have ground rules, if someone violates those expectations and you all do nothing about it - well, I've heard it said: you get what you tolerate.

Let's explore what ground rules are and how to put them in place for your team.

Tool: Ground Rules

Ground rules detail the code of conduct for a meeting and the team, explaining the behavior that's expected of all participants. Team ground rules should be created and agreed to by everyone in the team together, because groups more easily accept and abide by rules they've set themselves.

Another adage my wise advisors tell me:
If you think you have an agreement and the other person doesn't stick to it, then you didn't have an agreement, did you?

It's very common for workshop facilitators to establish ground rules at the beginning of the workshop. What's less common-but which has a higher positive impact over time-is the establishment of ground rules at the team, department, or organization level.

A Ground Rule by any other name may possibly smell less

Some people bristle at the idea of setting "Ground Rules" because it sounds too restrictive and punitive. If the idea of working with your team to set "Rules" rubs you the wrong way, consider these alternatives:

Meeting Code (as in Code of Conduct, or Pirates' Code)

Meeting Manifesto (akin to the Agile Manifesto, outlining shared principles)

Meeting Guidelines or Protocols or... you get the idea.

The other common name for Ground Rules is Team Norms (meaning "adopted standards"). If that works for you, go for it. One caution, though: people may use the term norm interchangeably to refer to your written "Norms" and also to any normal-but-undesirable behavior in the group, as in "Sally's 6 minute's late, as per norm," which can weaken these agreements over time.

While the ground rules you use should be developed collaboratively with your team, it's always helpful to start with some examples. Here are some sample ground rules that we've used to reinforce those behaviors the research indicates contribute most directly to meeting quality. You can find many other examples online and linked in the resources below.

A few of these directly enable teams to manage the person who hogs the time. I've made these bold.

Sample Ground Rules for a Team, Department, or Organization
Again, these are examples only.
Don't think some of these would fly with your group? Dislike the wording?

Please please please! Do what works for you!

That is, in fact, the whole point of the exercise.

Example Ground Rules

Respect our commitment to making meetings enjoyable and productive.

We adopt these ground rules as our shared commitment to doing great work in meetings. These are our rules; we can and will change the rules together if we feel there is a better way.

Everyone is responsible for enforcing the ground rules. Notice when we have strayed, and speak up.
(This one gives you and everyone else permission to say something if you feel there's a problem.)

Respect everyone's time.

Start on time, end on time.

Communicate in plenty of time about any times that need to change.

Share the time; do not monopolize the discussion or rob others of the time they need to share their perspective.
(This one says that it is a problem if one person does all the talking.)

Respect the work of the meeting.

Know the meeting's purpose and desired outcomes. If this is unclear, ask.

Come prepared and ready to engage.

Information is the raw material of results. Be ready to contribute any information you have that will improve the results in this meeting.

Everyone is responsible for keeping the meeting on track. Speak up if you feel the group is drifting.

Document clear commitments then follow-through; walk your talk.

Respect each other as human.

Assume best intentions, but do not assume anything else. Ask questions to better understand anything that is unclear or troubling.

Listen when others speak. Remember that no one has all the information, and don't interrupt.
(This rule, in combination with a well-run go-around, makes it possible for meeting leaders to get the opinions of several people into the discussion before calling on the dominant person and asks the dominant person to wait their turn.)

Share your views and concerns in the room. Show each other courage and respect by having the tough conversations that need to be had directly.

Treat each other with kindness and tolerance first. We all have tricky days when we aren't at our best. You will appreciate this tolerance when that tricky day is yours.

Take care of yourself. If you need to step out or take a break, do it. The group values your participation, so do what you need to do so you can devote your full attention.

Have fun!

How and When to Establish Team Ground Rules

Teams typically develop ground rules during team formation or alternatively, as part of a meeting improvement initiative.

Teams that are just forming can set their ground rules as one part of their larger working team agreement by asking "What agreements or ground rules do we want to set for our meetings?" as one item on the agenda.

For a template walking you through the creation of a full on Working Agreement, check out Lisette Sutherland's process for setting a " Remote Team Working Agreement" (Tip: you don't have to be a remote team to use it.) You'll also see expectations for meetings discussed as one part of Paul Axtell's process for introducing a new leader to a team. Finally, if you're leading a sensitive conversation, take a look at the Guidelines for Leading a Sensitive Discussion by Dr. Patricia Roberts.

Existing teams that want to improve their meetings can also create ground rules together in a short, focused meeting.

Here's an overview of that process.

A Meeting to Set Team Ground Rules

Purpose: To decide together our shared expectations for meetings
Desired Outcomes:

An understanding of the things we agree help us do our best work in meetings

A documented set of agreements-or ground rules-we'll use to make sure our meetings are effective going forward

Preparation:
Each team member should individually research these questions before the meeting.

1. What are meeting ground rules and how are they used?

2. What are some examples of companies or organizations that use meeting ground rules?

3. Which ground rules do you think would help us hold better meetings?

Agenda:

1. Introduction: What are ground rules and why should we use them?
Quickly check in with everyone and refresh the group on the purpose for this meeting. Then, discuss what people found during their preparatory research for the meeting.

2. What do we see when we're working our best? What are we doing (or not doing) in our most productive and enjoyable meetings?
Discuss your team's experience with meetings, capturing both what everyone feels works well and the challenges that the team feels keep meetings from succeeding.

3. Which ground rules should we adopt for our meetings?
Work together to create your initial list of ground rules. Focus on getting the right ideas out there rather than on perfecting the specific wording. These are your rules; you can always change them later.

4. Confirm the list: Are we agreed on these draft ground rules?
Wrap up the meeting by looking at the final list of draft ground rules as a group and answering:

Do these ground rules address the highest priority items we identified earlier? If not, is there anything else we need to change here now?

Where will we post the ground rules so we can easily refer to them in meetings?

Who will take responsibility for documenting these ground rules and sending them to the team?

Once you have a plan for finalizing and posting your new ground rules, you're done!

How to Use Ground Rules

Ground rules are used to train and adjust meeting behavior. The most impactful and dramatic use of a ground rule is during a meeting when someone says:

"Sorry, but we agreed to xyz in our ground rules, so I think we need to..."

For example:

"Sorry, but we agreed to have one conversation at a time. I think Ted wasn't quite finished with his point."

Or

"We agreed to come prepared to meetings, but it looks like we aren't ready to have this discussion. What should we do? Would you like to reschedule, or should we add 10 minutes to the meeting now so everyone can read the pre-work?"

Ground rules can also be:

Shared with new team members and employees as part of the onboarding process. This helps new people know what to expect. Ideally, the new person will learn the ground rules from another team member rather than the boss, as this doubly reinforces that these are everyone's rules to enforce.

Posted in meeting rooms as a reminder (and as a way to demonstrate your values to visitors). Several start ups and technology companies have prominent Meeting Rules posters in their conference rooms to both remind their employees and impress outsiders with their professionalism.

Updated to include special language and rituals that express your team's character and unique culture. For example, some teams use the "Vegas Rule" - as in "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" to establish that meeting discussions are to be considered confidential.

Shared in your organizational marketing and recruitment as an example of your team's dedication to quality results. Yes, companies actually do this, which is what makes that prep assignment to go find examples possible!

More Sample Ground Rules and Resources

Do you have ground rules that work particularly well for your team? Have you had an experience with ground rules that could benefit others?

Please share in the comments below!

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Using Ground Rules to Improve Engagement and Run Excellent Team Meetings

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You get what you tolerate. I've heard this adage many times when complaining about my dog's behavior, and occasionally regarding my children too. The person sharing that wisdom is telling me that my dog's and my children's poor behavior persists because I allow it to; because I'm creating the conditions where that kind of thing can occur not just once, but repeatedly.