Staff meetings are to be expected in any business. They are a great way to connect leaders with their staff, to discuss important issues and ideas that will affect the overall health of the organisation, and to answer questions and concerns while getting everyone on the same page. But if you are not using an agenda to plan your staff meeting, you will be missing out on an important component that will ensure the success of any meeting.
Continue reading to learn more about how agendas can help ensure your staff meetings are always a success.
Organise All Aspects of Your Upcoming Staff Meeting
Organising your upcoming staff meeting is the first step in ensuring that it will run smoothly and efficiently. Workers already struggle with paying attention during these meetings, often zoning out or even dozing off, doodling, or staring out the window, so making sure the meeting has a set schedule that everyone can follow will help keep everyone on track.
In addition to organising the actual content of your upcoming meeting, you can also organise where it will be held and at what time. Let everyone know well in advance, and send out reminders regularly. You can also post a room display so that everyone knows where the meeting will be held, and so other meetings will not conflict with yours by needing the same space at the same time. Find out more about room displays on the Pronestor website.
An Agenda Establishes Your Objectives
In addition to not paying attention during a meeting, a lot of workers also find that staff meetings are really pointless and a total waste of time. Therefore, setting up an agenda ahead of time will ensure that every meeting has specific objectives that need to be met. This will make it clear to your workers that the staff meeting is not pointless, and that they are there for a few valid reasons. This will encourage attention and participation, as you will all know what objectives you need to work towards, and you will need to work together to figure out how to reach those new goals.
Running on Time
One of the biggest peeves of all workers who have to attend meetings is getting out of a staff meeting later than they had originally anticipated. Setting an agenda could solve this problem because it will force everyone to start on time, follow a particular schedule along the way, and end on time.
Set your agenda in a way that will allow you to allocate a specific number of minutes to each task that needs to be accomplished or topic that needs to be discussed. If you do end up needing more time, you can set up another meeting or send a follow-up via email later on. In the meantime, your goal is to keep the staff meeting moving so that everyone can leave on time.
As you can see, running a staff meeting is not always easy, but if you have an agenda in place, you can make the process a lot more streamlined and effective.