Background

Most leaders conduct regular meetings with their direct reports, often called Staff Meetings (or sometimes Executive Meetings or Team Meetings). Unfortunately most leaders feel these meetings do not live up to their full potential. This blog post will explore the most important reason for this and show how to address it.

It’s especially important for leaders to invest effort in running the best possible Staff Meetings in light of the opportunity cost! Let’s say you have an executive team of 6 people spending 90 minutes every week in the Staff Meeting, that’s almost 500 of your company’s best and brightest hours a year – unbearable time to waste, not to mention the frustration and morale impact of squandered time and effort.

Getting rid of the meetings is not the right answer to the problem. There are many good reasons to run these meetings – typically weekly or bi-weekly – it’s a tried and true way to secure:

• Alignment of whole team around priorities, challenges etc
• Information Sharing
• Making sure any cross-functional blockers get resolved quickly
• A regular forum to take care of decisions and administrative issues with cross-functional implications
• It’s also a key forum to drive strong relationships and culture alignment in your leadership team

The Key Problem

We surveyed 50 leaders to gauge the frustrations around these meetings, and the response is very clear:

1. The average satisfaction with is low, averaging only 6 on a scale from 1 to 10.
2. The biggest frustrations have to do with the preparation of the meeting, with the very basic element of an Agenda taking the top spot

Based on our own experience we very much recognize these issues. We would even venture an additional point, lack of preparation (including agenda) is the main issue, but simply driving the agenda and content alone as a leader is not the answer: The key to dramatically lifting the quality of your Staff Meetings is to run an inclusive, collaborative preparation process, where you ensure every Staff Member gets the opportunity to contribute to the content of the meeting.

The Solution: Collaborative Preparation

The solution is simple (in theory), in preparation for each Staff Meeting, ask your team for contribution. We suggest asking these 3 questions:

1. How are you feeling this week (1-5)? This is a great question to trigger a discussion of everybody’s wins and challenges. It’s key to ask this in advance to give everybody a chance to conduct some deep reflection on this, rather than shooting from the hip with no warning at the meeting. This question is also a good prompt to make sure we share and support each other during the ups and downs of running a business
2. What are the top 3 things on your mind? An open question to make sure we share important successes,issues, and events across the team, often this will surface topics that require further work to address coordination, roadblocks etc
3. Do you have any topics for this week’s agenda? Any topic that does not fall under the first two questions, should have its own agenda item, with well-prepared content.

Send these 3 questions to your staff 2 days prior to the meeting, so you can incorporate the input into an agenda that you publish the day before the meeting. The easiest way to do this is to pass a shared document around to collect the input in. Feel free to use our template.

How to implement the solution like clockwork with Writeflow

Asking the 3 questions and following up to ensure response before every staff meeting, remembering to kick off the process two days in advance is a hassle to get right every single time. Based on experience many leaders lapse after a couple of iterations as the many day to day challenges of leading a growth company get in the way.

Writeflow was created exactly for this challenge: Doing the boring tasks for the leader like clockwork, every time.

With Writeflow you define a weekly flow that sends out the document to the participants on schedule, and ensures responses are collected. Furthermore Writeflow automates the remaining tasks of a great meeting:

1. Preparing the document for the next meeting cycle
2. Collecting input (with automatic follow up reminders)
3. Creating and publishing the final agenda
4. Publishing meeting notes
5. Saving a snapshot of every week’s meeting document

The video in the beginning of the post shows in more detail how this is implemented.