How to Have More Effective Team Meetings

Establishing a communication rhythm with your team will help you grow and build momentum in your business. Without a rhythm of communication you run the risk of getting off course for a long time before you are able to review your position, adjust, and reset to get back on course—this can be fatal to your business.

Meetings are what establish your rhythm of communication. There are two types of meetings:

1. Strategic — reviewing previous performance, discussing opportunities, planning for the future and prioritizing
2. Status — updating and reviewing the status of the strategic work that you are currently executing

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Because it takes time to implement strategies, the cadence of strategic meetings can be further apart, think yearly and quarterly. Status meetings on the other-hand need to happen much more regularly, at minimum these meetings should be happening weekly and even daily.

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For any of these meetings to be effective, they need to have a consistent structure, including a:

1. Purpose
2. Agenda
3. Output

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The purpose, agenda, and output for a yearly planning meeting will be very different from the purpose, agenda, and output of daily check-in meetings. Do your best to not mash everything together, thinking strategically taps into a different part of your brain than thinking about daily to-do lists—we need to create the space and structure for both, that is how meetings become more effective.

Here are two examples of how you can structure your daily and weekly meetings to have more effective outcomes:

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Daily Check-In

Purpose

1. Check-in with members of your team, likely your general manager, or studio manager, and sales manager
2. Get clear on priorities
3. Address any issues

Agenda

1. What did each team member accomplish yesterday?
2. What are each team members priorities for today?
3. Where are any team members stuck?

Output

1. What are our priorities for the day as a team?
2. What are the issues that we need to address today?

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With tools like Slack and ZipMessage you can make your Daily Check-In meetings asynchronous. Your team members can leave a voice note or Slack message in a dedicated private channel each day that should take them less than 2 minutes. We're not trying to create more work here, we're trying to be more effective—where possible, leverage technology to make your meetings more efficient.

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Weekly Check-In

Purpose

1. Share the team wins for the week
2. Use performance reporting to measure your actual weekly metrics against your targets
3. Review any blockers to action
4. Log and review any issues

Agenda

1. Celebrate any wins
2. Track our progress against our monthly targets for the key metrics of the studio
3. Review the blockers
4. Share any announcements
5. Review issues
6. Score the meeting (1 to 10, how can the meeting itself be improved)

Output

1. What are the changes that need to be made?
2. Update progress towards monthly targets
3. Update on blockers
4. What are the resolved issues?

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Establishing a rhythm of communication will change the trajectory of your business. We get it, it's been a crazy couple of years, so now is as good a time as any to get into a new rhythm, to set a new cadence for the future of your studio and your team.

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