With many different people, teams, or departments working together on projects, it’s easy for information to get jumbled or disorganized. Understanding the size and scope of all projects and keeping project goals in mind can be a large task for management. Meetings give your employees a platform to express their concerns while also bringing them together so that they feel valued.
The first and most important benefit your employees will experience is regularity. This encourages your employees and managers to prepare material for future meetings ahead of time. Also, holding regular meetings inspires your employees to add more regularity to their schedule to mirror the meeting schedule. If they know there will always be a meeting at noon on Wednesday, then they will be inclined to plan their lunch accordingly. Having consistency and regularity removes stress and anxiety about “surprise” or “emergency” meetings that could otherwise throw your employees off-track.
Another great benefit is positive emotion. Bringing your team or different departments together give them the chance to validates their ideas by brainstorming and collaborating. Bringing different departments together helps to re-balance the workload by allowing ideas to flow and jobs to be assigned in the same place. All these activities help create positive emotion and the feeling of accomplishment for all members, which helps employees to feel valued as a part of the team.
When you bring your teams together, you create company culture. Keep the topic conversational at meetings, where the stress level is as low as possible. This low-stress environment creates the sense of family, which in turn creates excitement for employees that might have been afraid or dreading a very heavy meeting. Keep it light. Don’t forget to include everyone, and make sure everyone’s voice is heard. The simple action of either rotating through each member’s concerns one-by-one in a circle, or holding short, individual sessions to get ideas/concerns onto the table will change how your employees view meetings. Be sure to structure your meetings in the most effective way for the size of your business and the importance of the topics to be covered.
What does all this structure lead to? Productivity. A few minutes dedicated to the group can sometimes prove more productive than individual progress. These short but highly productive meeting times help to connect all project leaders and members swiftly. The time for collaboration can remove extra work by exposing jobs that might be overlapped by multiple people.
Ultimately, you are showing your team about your biggest priority: organization. There’s a reason the biggest information and management websites use the .org domain. They just don’t fit into any other category. Showing your customers, as well as your employees, how much time team leaders and managers spend gathering information about team projects and feedback gives them a peace-of-mind knowing that most of your effort goes into staying as objective as possible about issues that arise. Regular meetings create an efficient source of project information for the leader, which gives them the opportunities to organize team and distribute tasks effectively. Meetings also lead to better records of information, and better records can save you time and money when things go wrong or misunderstandings inevitably happen.
If you’re interested to know more about how to make your meetings effective in terms of length or other criteria besides the regularity, I suggest checking out Lucid Meeting’s Blog. They have a plethora of great information on meetings.
Creative by The Evoke Group