We’ve all been there, stuck in a meeting that feels like a complete waste of time, with no end in sight. According to research conducted by Sloan, only 50% of the time spent in meetings is measured as effective or engaging.
As a leader, it’s vital to prepare for and execute an effective staff meeting to ensure your association is on track to hit its goals. Read our blog for three expert tips to help you prepare and execute effective staff meetings at your organization.
3 tips to make association staff meetings more effective
Bloomberg reports that ineffective meetings waste about $25,000 per employee annually. Depending on how many employees your organization has, that number can quickly add up.
Here are three strategies to make your staff meetings more organized and effective:
1. Prewire the audience before meetings
Prewiring audiences before beginning a meeting can help you transform your discussions. A long time ago, Frank Mendoza, MBA, taught me the concept of “prewiring” before you go into a meeting. Prewiring can ensure your teams, executives, and peers are aware of the direction that you’re going in your conversation. It takes a little more energy and time, but it saves you from having a derailed meeting.
In the best-case scenario, you’ll have 75%+ of the audience already going in with a general agreement of your goals. This makes for a great discussion, provides you with allies in the meeting, and ensures that you begin the meeting with a refined topic. When you prewire in a meeting, you can align with your staff, drive value, and remove simple blockers that derail your result.
2. Make your meetings count
According to the 2024 U.S. Internal Meetings Impact Report, a majority of the surveyed employees said they wanted less frequent but more impactful in-person meetings. Your meetings are hugely important to your association, but you need to make them count – whether in-person or virtually. Before you send out your staff meeting invites, you’ll want to define the meeting objectives and ask that ever important question: could this meeting be an email?
Throughout the meeting, keep your team on track ,by asking questions to keep participants engaged. You’ll also want to end the meeting with clear action items, owners, and timelines to ensure everything is on track for your next meeting.
3. Gather team feedback
More leaders are gathering feedback about the effectiveness of their meetings, with 92% of leaders reporting they used metrics to measure the success of internal meetings. Take time to gather feedback about your association’s meetings. Doing so will give you a wealth of insights into how your meetings operate.
Ask your teams for feedback on areas where you can improve your staff meeting effectiveness. For example, does your entire team feel like they have a chance to speak at meetings? Does your team feel like they meet enough, or perhaps not enough?
Opening up discussion on how your association conducts meetings will go a long way toward improving the effectiveness of how your teams communicate and collaborate.
Associations and organizations alike spend so much of their days in staff meetings. It’s vital to make meetings better for your employees and your entire organization.
