5 Tips for Transforming Weekly Staff Meetings

A good strategic plan provides a long-term perspective for driving results by helping leaders have sustainable focus on the things that matter most. Attaining sustainability requires daily execution of the plan across the organization. So how can processes be put in place to keep people focused on the short-term?

Start by taking a look at your weekly staff meetings. It’s time for a meeting makeover if your weekly staff meetings are characterized by any of the following:

• Tactics are discussed without context to specific goals desired
• People talk a lot about all the activities they’re doing so they sound busy
• Last week’s actions are now totally forgotten

Driving results from the bottom up requires having people take ownership and accountability. It’s time to ditch meetings without metrics and replace them with productive, insightful working sessions driven by data.

What could an ideal staff meeting look like? Imagine if actions of individuals are presented in the context of organizational priorities. What if every person focused only on the critical few priorities that mattered most in achieving organizational objectives? What if your entire staff had visibility into the actions of others and how they impact the organization?

It would be transformational.

Breaking old habits isn’t easy. How weekly staff meetings are conducted isn’t an exception. Ownership and accountability driven from the bottom up requires appropriate expectation-setting supported by goal-driven data.

Here are five tips for helping get started.

• Identify your organization’s strategic priorities. Ideally, there should be no more than 3-5 priorities. Each priority should be supported by goals with clear performance metrics that are updated weekly. A good strategic plan will have these.
• Assign individuals a combination of goals and action items that support the strategic priority.
• Structure the staff meeting around your team’s respective strategic priorities with read-outs by performance-metric owners. Have each owner discuss changes to the weekly metrics they represent, including a recap of previous and upcoming actions, which will impact the metric.
• Repeat this process for each priority – everyone on your team needs to be accountable for at least one goal.
• Be quick about it. With focus comes brevity. Spend no more than 10 minutes on each strategic priority and supporting goals and metrics.

Conclude each meeting with every staff member identifying any cross-functional dependencies, or activities being pursued that are not directly tied to a strategic priority. Change does not occur overnight, so it’s going to take a few meetings before a repeatable cadence takes shape.

To learn more about the tools and processes for transforming your weekly staff meetings be sure to check out OnStrategy’s free, live webinar calendar. Each week, we’re sharing insights and best-practices for driving results from the bottom up.