Transform Your Staff Meetings into Productive Time

nyone who has ever been part of a team knows that staff meetings can be monotonous. Even with an ongoing agenda of topics, staff meetings are dry, repetitive, and non-productive. While routine staff meetings keep your team informed, many of them lack purpose and feel like wasted time for everyone.

Why not transform your staff meetings into productive time with the team?

In this article, we provide you with guidelines on how to add more energy to your staff meetings by engaging your team in ongoing problem-solving and process improvement activity. By using time in each staff meeting to diagnose and solve problems, you will not only become a more effective leader, but this allows you to adopt an easy and proactive process improvement methodology that benefits your team and the organization.

Note: It does not matter if your meetings are live and in-person, or virtual, you can vary how you facilitate these ideas based on the communication method.

Set Expectations

If you decide to implement this process in your meetings, it’s a good idea in your first staff meeting to share your intent with the team. Explain that in order to use their time more effectively, you want to dedicate time in each meeting to address current problems, improve internal or externals processes, procedures, or how you do business. Add an agenda item (suggested 30 minutes) to focus on problem-solving/process improvement. Solicit and address concerns or questions from your team members.

Generate Opportunity Areas

Once you have established that process improvement will be a standard for your staff meetings, it’s important to get the team’s input on what should be addressed. Use another staff meeting to conduct a brainstorming session with the team to identify the ideas to focus on in subsequent meetings.

Rules of Brainstorming • Gather as many ideas as possible • Hold back judgement • Encourage creativity and diversity of thought • Put a time limit on idea generation

Meeting Types In-person meeting: Use a large space on the wall and give each team member a pack of post-it notes. Give them a time limit to complete the activity with an emphasis on "quantity of ideas" at this point. Virtual meeting: Use a virtual white-board or chat to generate ideas from team members. Make sure to save ideas after the meeting for future use.

Pick Ideas to Address

If your team has generated a long list of ideas, you will want to identify which ones are most useful to focus on in subsequent meetings. Identify criteria (with the team’s input) to help you determine which ideas to work on as a team. Some examples of criteria to use may include customer impacts, cost reduction, scope of problem, and impact to the organization and people. Make sure to get everyone’s input and gain agreement from the team for the priorities that you will address moving forward in future team meetings.

Analyze the Problem(s)

One way to analyze the identified problem is through the use of a useful problem-solving tool – the Ishikawa Diagram. The Ishikawa Diagram, or more commonly referred to as the Fishbone Diagram, is a process that considers the cause and effect of a problem to help get to the root cause (see example below).

Starting with the problem statement, brainstorm possible cause/effect of the problem to pinpoint what may be at the root of the problem. In most cases, the Fishbone process demonstrates the complexity of any issue, and provides you with multiple ways of looking at the problem. After the initial brainstorming, your team may combine some or throw out others to come up with the single most important driver of your identified problem.

Create Solutions

Once you have identified the possible causes of a problem, now you can generate ideas on how to solve it. Use the brainstorming process and process of elimination to arrive at solutions that your team members can implement. Make sure to establish criteria for evaluating the implemented solution.

Turn Ideas Into Action

If you have taken a problem through this process, it’s time to implement your chosen solution. Assign the solution to a member or members of your team. Ask for a plan that outlines the steps, milestones, due dates, and responsibility of each task. Use subsequent meetings to have team members report on the progress and outcomes of the solution.

Rinse and Repeat

Congratulations! You have taken your team through the creative process for identifying and designing solutions to improve your business. Continue this process with other ideas generated from your initial brainstorming session with the team.

If you want to be a more effective leader and increase the engagement of your team, implementing a simple process improvement approach to your staff meetings can make a big difference.

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About WestStar Associates

We are practitioners of proven change leadership concepts with emphasis on reinforcement and measurement of change efforts. We are a strategic solution provider utilizing all methods of learning, performance support, and leadership practices to enable and sustain organizational and employee growth.

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