Meetings are important, very very important! As a manager, you know you just cannot manage things all alone. Given that, you have a team working with you towards a specific goal, you need to know what everyone is up to i.e the progress of the tasks they have been assigned. But is the agenda of every meeting limited to just that?
Certainly not. The meetings can also help you in motivating the team, and in return expecting better results. Infact, there are a lot of project management solutions out there to help you with that.
Take a look at this blog to know what can be done to pep up your meetings and make them more than just matching the to do checklist.
Invite Ideas
Your entire month’s meeting should revolve around the completion of a milestone for which you have set certain benchmarks throughout the month. Focus on getting them accomplished. Set smaller, realistic goals and timelines for the achievement of the bigger one. Also, don’t make meetings only about task completion, discuss with your teammates what else could be done for the accomplishment of the bigger goal. You would never get to know the hidden gem of your team, till the time you just pass on orders and do one-way communication.
Make agenda more purposeful
Everytime you hold a meeting, whether ad-hoc or pre-planned, let the team members prepare themselves for it. Let them give some suggestion on the situation. However, if the meeting is for the announcement of something great, let the meeting’s agenda be a surprise! Intimation of the purpose of the meeting saves you from seeing the blank faces, excuses and unpreparedness.
Keep a track of actions and decisions
Talking about the “minutes of meeting” here but not asking you to pass them on via emails. An even better way to do so is making the use of project management solutions optimally. If you want, you can float the mail, but don’t forget to add the tasks to the team mate’s dashboard and put comments, then and there.
Show them the progress
Being a good manager, you should strive to motivate employees to improve or perform even better. You can show them the progress using robust project management software. However, it is always better to look at the graphs yourself first.
Apart from this, to make meetings more effective, you also need to promote an environment of cooperation and problem-solving rather than the habit of putting the blame on each other.
Sitting in meetings and making other also sit in it without a goal bigger than checking deliverables is nothing less than underutilization of time and your team. Change the way you have been holding meetings if you are doing it that way only.