Staff meetings are a fact of life in the nonprofit world.
They may feel annoying and tedious, but they are necessary.
Your staff meetings provide an opportunity to convey information, solicit ideas, allow for group discussion, problem solve and create a sense of community.
If you have left your staff meetings feeling frustrated with the tepid level of engagement, and a sense that the things left unsaid have hijacked the agenda, do not despair, you are not alone.
With planning and intent, it is possible to shift the tenor of your staff meetings. It can change from a dry, necessary obligation, or even worse a tableau of agency dysfunction, to an engaging manifestation of best practice for staff engagement, collaborative decision making and agency commitment.
As a nonprofit leader, when you call a staff meeting you can model your agency’s values by how you conduct yourself and structure the gathering.
Today’s episode will explore ways your staff meetings can build a strong work culture.
You can find the full transcript of this episode at relishyourrole.com/9
At their best, staff meetings are full of energy, creativity, candor and facilitate staff bonding. At their worst, they are filled with passive aggressive behavior and unspoken resentments.
Most meetings fall in between. However, if we are honest, as the executive director, too often your regularly scheduled staff meetings feel unsatisfactory, flat and marginally productive.
If your staff meetings are stale, less productive, or perhaps just not meeting your expectations, it may be time to examine five basic components of your staff meetings and see how you measure up.
Five components of Successful Staff Meetings
Let’s first identify the critical components of a successful staff meeting.
- A clear meeting purpose.
- Thoughtful consideration of participants.
- A shared expectation of everyone’s role in the meeting.
- An agenda which supports the meeting’s purpose.
- The structure of the meeting facilitates its purpose and participant expectations.
Each of these components are intertwined and need to support and reinforce one another. If there is an inconsistent through line between these components, your staff meetings are most likely a missed opportunity.
#1. Clarify Your Meeting’s Purpose
Every time you convene a group of staff together there must be a clear reason for doing so. To meet weekly to just ‘update everyone ‘is not a compelling purpose.
When you gather a group there is a magic alchemy created by the different personalities, backgrounds and knowledge brought together.
Any successful staff meeting capitalizes on the group dynamic.
Gathering to be talked at without any mechanism for interaction hampers staff engagement.
Meetings morph from an obligation to a valuable use of time if participants have a means to for true engagement.
Even those participants who are introverted and do not speak up in a group recognize the value of a meeting which provides avenues for meaningful interaction.
If the meeting serves as a venue just to share information, without capitalizing on the fact you have different expertise and viewpoints in the room, a meeting may not be necessary and may do more harm than good.
Rethink if the same information can be distributed differently.
If you need to convene your staff to share information with them, there must be the opportunity for them to interact, ask questions, be given a task to complete based on the information.
To merely lecture with no staff interaction is experienced as devaluing for staff and people begin to tune out.
#2. Give the Meeting A Clear Intent
Hopefully, it goes without saying that as the leader, you should have a clear purpose for every meeting you convene.
Rather than determining the purpose of your meeting solely by the information you want to convey, think about the difference it would make if the meeting is framed in terms of outcomes you want to achieve.
Notice the shift from stating the purpose as ‘everyone is aware of the volunteer appreciation day next month’ to ‘brainstorming ways in which all aspects of the agency can recognize our volunteers’.
Think about the difference in a staff meeting whose purpose is ‘informing everyone of a grant being submitted’ to ‘talking through the impact of potentially receiving new revenue’ or ‘how can we all become aware of new funding opportunities’.
If you shift your thinking of the purpose of a meeting from inputs to outcome, you have taken the first step in setting the stage for more meaningful staff convenings.
#3. Leverage Human Capital
Every meeting should capitalize on the human talent in the room.
Every agency has their own pattern of how often specific clusters of staff meet. You may have inherited that schedule or have created your own or tweaked the staff meeting schedules over the years.
A meeting should not be held simply because it is scheduled. You need a clear reason, and that reason should factor in and incorporate the presence of others in the room.
If you value collaboration, your meeting purpose should support this.
While the purpose of sharing information remains the same, it needs to be presented in a way in which the participants can meaningfully interact with the information. By reframing the focus on outcomes, the meeting will shift from participants passively receiving the information to a discussion, or problem solving or brainstorming or planning.
By shifting to an outcome focus which capitalizes on the presence of others in the room, your meetings become more valuable and reinforce a shared sense of purpose.
#4. Careful Planning
Making this shift does not occur with some forethought and planning.
With an outcome focus, plan you can think through what you are trying to achieve and how you can present the information in a way which elicits feedback and engagement.
This may require you to disseminate some information through a memo and save the meeting time for those things which require and are improved by group dialogue.
If others are involved in presenting information, prepare for the session by posing questions to help them frame their presentation from an outcome perspective.
Using an outcome approach may result in small changes, a shift from imparting information to seeking feedback, that creates buy-in and participation.
You must be deliberate in how you use your staff meeting time. Like so many other elements of strengthening your work relationships, it takes time and intentionality.
There are other important elements, such as the structure and order of the agenda which enhances participation which I will talk address in future episodes.
In the meantime, think about shifting your staff meetings’ purpose with outcomes in mind. I am confident you and your staff will experience a positive shift in engagement.
You can make these changes and I am here to help.