Weekly staff meetings are crucial to keeping your team performing at their best, especially in these unprecedented times. Weekly meetings are also a great chance to see how your staff are doing on a personal basis too. Take a look at these ten questions you can ask your staff to cover all bases of their jobs and how they contribute to the overall performance of the business
Regular staff meetings are essential to address the direction of work, align expectations and lead a team forward to ultimately achieve targets. We recently ran a poll on LinkedIn where 73% of respondents said that they hold weekly staff meetings with their teams. We predicted that this would be the result as we, at Matrix, hold weekly staff meetings with each team in the business in order to chat about KPIs, goals, and general activities.
We know that regular routine tasks can occasionally lose momentum and require an injection of new life to energise the team and provide positive motivation for the week. Weekly meetings require time and focus from everyone in attendance making it essential that every minute counts and the team leave feeling empowered to succeed.
Here are 10 questions to ask yourself when planning your weekly staff meetings and some ideas to help you get the most out of them:
1. What outcome do I want from my team meeting?
It’s important to have a clear outcome for the meeting to ensure everyone gets value from their time commitment.
2. How can I quickly share where we are as a team?
Before the meeting starts, familiarise yourself with the progress made last week and how each individual is performing towards their objectives.
3. What does an outstanding week/day look like to us as a team?
Clarify with each team member what a great day looks like to them and their job. This could be made up of smaller targets being met such as a number of outbound sales calls being made, a number of LinkedIn connections, moving a prospect to the next stage of the sales process, etc. Make this clear with the whole team and inspire them to achieve this in doing so.
4. How can I increase team engagement?
Encourage team togetherness and motivation by having clearly focused values and incentives for when targets are met.
5. How can I encourage accountability?
Each team member should set a mini target for themselves for the week. This could be something like generating X number of new leads or having X number of customer meetings. You can then review these at the end of the week. Make sure these targets are achievable with some stretch, this is meant to encourage motivation, not to overwhelm.
6. How can I celebrate the progress we make as a team?
It’s important to celebrate successes to ensure your staff feel valued and realise how their work affects the overall business performance. You could incentivise progress made each week and the person that makes the most progress towards their objectives gets some sort of recognition.
7. How can I keep the meeting focused and on point?
You could introduce the ‘3-minute meeting model’ where you first give each team member 90 seconds to tell the team what they’ve achieved during the week. They then use the other 90 seconds to talk through what their focus is for the week ahead. In just 3 minutes you will get a good idea of how each person is performing.
8. How can I introduce the sharing of monthly wins?
Similar to point 6, but at a team level, successes should be celebrated on a weekly and monthly basis to spark motivation and team engagement. Ask each team to share their monthly wins, any positive customer feedback they’ve received or milestones they’ve reached, how have they moved the business closer to achieving the overall strategic vision, etc.
9. How can I ensure we are sticking to our core values as a business?
If you have 5-6 company values you can build them into your weekly meeting and allocate one value to discuss each week.
10. How can I ensure that everyone on the team understands what we’re going to achieve?
This is the secret sauce and where it becomes fundamental to ensure you are effectively cascading your company vision and overall strategic objectives throughout all of your distributed teams and levels. Getting everyone on the same page and in sync so their objectives correspond with the business priorities means they can then work on the right things to really make a difference.
We hope these questions help you to organise your weekly meetings to make sure you get the most out of the time spent with your team. Here’s a recap image (quick tip: right-click on the below image and save to your computer or laptop for quick access when heading to your weekly team meeting)
