It’s frustrating and disheartening when you get your team together, only to be the lone voice in the room.
When meetings become updates only rather than collaboration, people tend to check out and focus on proving their productivity, rather than listening and sharing relevant insights.
Your well-intended plan to increase collaboration goes out the window, and suddenly one hour with 5 people becomes 5 hours lost productivity.
Your team may have slipped into a comfortable habit of passive presenteeism. It’s natural just to turn up and to rely on someone else to run it if you have the choice.
It takes a concerted effort to re-boot meeting, from everyone involved. This might sound cheesy, but surely getting a group of people who work on things together should be something to look forward to rather than a necessary evil?
If this sounds familiar, it’s time to re-set, mix it up and re-energise your time together - you’ve got nothing to lose.
Be open with your team about changing it up. Ask them what the most valuable use of their time would be and re-visit what the objective of coming together. What insights are most valuable to share and receive? In what format? How often? Who?
Create a collective commitment to how the meetings would run and get creative with it. There’s no right or wrong way.
Some options:
✸ Make it a 10-15 min stand-up daily, rather than a once a week for an hour
✸ Rotate the ‘chair’
✸ Don't default to an hour, try 20 or 40 mins and see if that's actually enough
✸ Do a traffic light check in on the progress of projects (updated prior)
✸ Rate wellbeing or workload from 1 – 5
✸ Have a preparation prompts as part of the meeting invite
✸ Invite examples of successes or appreciation
✸ Ask what the biggest blockers and challenges are
✸ Prompt requests for help from the group
What’s the best strategy you’ve seen to re-energise meetings?
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