How well do you communicate with your team? Do you update your team on your business performance, issues you need their support to resolve and feedback on a job well done?

When the size of your team is small communicating one-to-one seems easier than calling a meeting. The logistics of getting everyone into one room and at a time when no one is busy on other tasks can seem more trouble than its worth.

However, calling your team to a meeting ensures that:

• Everyone feels like part of the team
• Your message is delivered as you’d like the team to hear it, and everyone receives the same messsage
• Questions are asked and answered openly, allowing all team members to participate
• You only have to say it once!

Effective meeting etiquette is important, however, to ensure the meeting is purposeful, achieves the outcome and does not have a negative impact. The following suggestions will help you conduct successful meetings:

• Is the meeting necessary? Generally meetings are not 100% productive time for all attendees. If the objective is not to participate in two-way discussions but rather to present, and it is not of sufficient importance it needs to be delivered in person, consider an alternate method of communication, e.g. email bulletin.
• Check the attendee list - If the meeting is to resolve a specific issue, invite only those directly affected. If a whole team is affected by an issue or decision, the team leader should attend only and take responsibility for relaying the information back to the team.
• Be punctual - everyone should be ready to commence at the agreed time; do not recap for late comers
• Take notes, distribute them and follow up - meeting notes provide a checklist for follow up and a means of making people accountable to their decisions and deadlines
• Start with the most serious issues, and work down to the minor matters
• No war stories - avoid distractions and veering off topic; important side issues should be scheduled for their own meeting
• One meeting at a time - if team members start talking amongst themselves, bring their attention back to the meeting
• Stay on time - plan before the meeting an estimated duration for each topic, and stick to it. If a topic is taking longer than planned consider having a separate meeting on just that one issue.

For small organisations a monthly meeting of a fixed duration - perhaps an hour - provides you with an opportunity to communicate important messages to your team, demonstrates that you are open and sharing with your staff and enables you to hear from the team the issues that are important to them.

Manage the meeting effectively and it will be an asset to your leadership.

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The traditional meeting format may be appropriate most of the time. But what if its not working for you?
There are many times when a round table, conference styled meeting is not appropriate - too formal, not focussed on one specific problem, too many people present, not enough time. Using an alternate format for the meeting may provide a solution to specific problems. Here are some examples:

Mary is responsible for overseeing the new inventory management software system. She needs everyone to attend an information session but the warehouse is flat out with customer orders and there is no time to bring everyone together. What is a good option for her to get these sessions done?
Lunch and learn has become a common phrase to describe an informative or training session conducted during a personnel lunch break. Mary could separate the team members into groups of 5 to 8 and invite them to a meeting room to have their lunch while she runs through the information session. With a team size of 40, that would allow her to complete the sessions in a week without impacting on the warehouse.

There is one sticky issue with lunch and learn - who pays for lunch? A good way to handle it is this:

• If the team are "giving up" their lunch hour to attend a mandatory session, then for management to pay for lunch (typically $8-10 per person), the total cost would be less than one hour of overtime for each team member...so providing lunch is a good idea.
• Lunch and learn sessions are often used for informal team training and are attended optionally. For these sessions team members should bring their own lunch.

John’s team are behind schedule on delivering a kitchen refit to a customer. They have a list of outstanding actions, but keeping everyone focussed on the list is proving hard. How can John communicate more effectively with the team without a meeting cutting into their time?
In this situation John should implement a "no chair" or "scrum" meeting. This type of meeting is typically used in two situations:

• Team deadlines - the short, regular meeting style keeps the team focussed on the day’s events; if you get today’s tasks done, then you are not behind when you come in tomorrow!
• Daily executive review - many larger corporations use this meeting each morning to recap any issues from the previous day, new actions for the current day and for the attendees to raise any issues proactively

The meeting is run in the following way:

• The same person leads discussion at each meeting; typically this would be the leading tradesman, a project engineer or the coordinator who manages the list of tasks
• All attendees stand; the meeting should take no longer than 15 minutes. If people sit they become comfortable and slow down the meeting. However, 15 minutes is not too long to stand and everyone stays more focussed.
• Each person presents to the meeting; generally three items are raised in short form - think verbal bullet points! For example:
  • An item of concern not completed or that occurred yesterday
  • The main activity for today
  • Identifying a person shorthanded who needs help or a critical activity that remains unassigned

At the end of the meeting every person should know what they are tasked with doing and achieving for that day.

Pat’s plumbing business has a team of 20 who are on the road most of the day. The monthly team meeting has not been scheduled for two months because there has not been a time during the day when everyone is in the workshop. What can Pat do?
Pat’s best option is to schedule a meeting for first thing in the morning and ask the team to come in one hour early for the meeting. A morning meeting is good because everyone is fresh and the team probably comes in at least once a week to submit timesheets and other paperwork.
Some of the team may grumble about the extra hour. One option for managing that is to allow each team member to finish one hour early on one day during the subsequent month, in lieu of the meeting time. If a different team member finishes early each day, the impact on the business is minimal, and no one has been disadvantaged.

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