Enhance Team Meetings: Proven Practices to Align with Company Values and Boost Productivity

One of the cornerstones of most organizations lies within their ongoing meetings and the team dynamics that do or do not support their values. It’s incredible how a meeting can either unite people toward a shared mission or polarize people into their own silos. If you’ve ever worked anywhere that had meetings, you know what I’m talking about. Knowing how to make team meetings more engaging is crucial.

There are meetings with formal agendas, well-thought-out presentations, and engaging conversations that move the needle forward. And then there are meetings with no apparent agenda (written or thought of), presentations that are scattered at best, and conversations that go in circles. A company’s culture is largely reflective of how people respect one another’s time and energy. The team dynamics in meetings are a huge opportunity to observe and determine what else might be possible.

Now imagine a well-thought-out, productive, and engaging team meeting that also wove in the company’s values. In other words, a team meeting that was in alignment with everything your company believed in and stood for. Might that make a positive impact? Might that create an infrastructure for your values to be honored and to flourish?

Uh, yeah!

Here are a few ways that you can integrate proven practices while also incorporating your unique core values into team meeting dynamics—in other words, small shifts that are sure to make a big impact. So you know how to make team meetings more engaging.

Meeting Dynamics

Meetings are such a significant part of the day-to-day culture at work. And just as is the case with everything else, some meetings leave us feeling drained and others leave us feeling energized. At the height of the COVID pandemic, online meetings became one of the only ways to connect consistently, but they sadly left most people feeling like Zoom zombies. An in-person meeting that lacks engagement, focus, and connection sucks. And an online meeting that lacks engagement, focus, and connection can suck you dry. Imagine what could be possible if your team looked forward to meetings, connected and built trust during your meetings, and left feeling a sense of purpose and renewed energy when the meeting concluded?

These tried-and-true practices will get you and your team set up for a culture where meetings are valued and serve everyone who attends.

Start and end on time.

Timeliness shows a commitment to respect for each other’s needs and ignites clear expectations, consistency, and trust. When you regularly start late or run over on meetings, you’re sending the message that their time is not valuable.

If this is an issue at your organization, consider adding a formal role of a timekeeper in each meeting. This person can be responsible for keeping the meeting facilitator on track with each item on their agenda. Ask facilitators to provide the timekeeper with their agenda and the time allotted for each section in advance so that they can be sure to gently let the facilitator know that it’s time to move onto the next agenda item and/or decide as a team if they want to stay on that topic and adjust the meeting or put a pin in it until next time. A timekeeper is especially helpful for giving a five-minute warning to ensure that wrap-up begins as well as a reminder that the time is now complete for when the meeting is slated to end.

This may sound extreme to some who don’t have an issue with timekeeping in their cultural norms. But I’ve been hired to specifically help teams with this issue, and this level of attention to detail and to time has made a huge impact in shifting the norm.

Begin with an intention.

Start your meeting explaining why you’re together and why it matters. I first heard of this proven practice when Oprah shared that she required meeting organizers to share their intention for the gathering at its start. If the topic or flow of conversation was not in alignment with that intention, the meeting was ended.

With my own work, we ensure that the intention is written at the top of the agenda so that it’s loud and clear. Sometimes we even have intentions for different sections of the agenda to ensure that we’re transparent with why we’re discussing it. Just like with timekeepers and with Oprah’s rule, it can be helpful to empower your people to keep you on track with your intentions.

One of my clients uses the phrase “We’re in the weeds” whenever a meeting goes down a rabbit hole that it wasn’t meant to. Another uses the phrases “Zoom in” or “Zoom out” when they want to remind their team members that they’re getting too macro or too micro in their discussions. Having these key phrases developed and agreed upon as an entire company helps others to feel empowered to keep the meeting on track with its intention instead of going completely offtrack and feeling like a waste of time for participants.

Recite and review the values.

Take a moment to remind yourself of your company’s values and pull out specific value promises that apply to meeting norms. When you honor value promises, people are more likely to behave in alignment with those agreements.

Incorporate the values into the agenda.

Are the meeting topics related to your company’s values? Perhaps you’re talking about the latest updates to your website, and you also have the values of innovation and growth. Why not make that connection clear instead of relying on a subconscious connection that people may or may not pick up on? I’ve often broken up meeting agendas into sections based on each value and the content that was connected to it. It made people realize that they were living the values in more ways than they knew, and it demonstrated that living your values didn’t have to involve a huge change in what was already happening.

Be aware of how the team dynamics are unfolding, and readjust as needed.

Often meetings seem to be going great and then take a sharp turn into rocky territory. Whether it’s someone’s bad behavior, a poorly organized conversation, or even a meeting that feels like it’s redundant or not a good use of time. These are all moments to pause and choose to end a meeting and regroup when things are in a better place. I read a memo that Elon Musk sent to his team around innovation during the pandemic. It stated, “Leave if you’re not contributing. Walk out of a meeting, or drop off a call as soon as it’s obvious that you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave; it is rude to make someone else waste their time.”

On the other end of the spectrum, what if the meeting is high energy and is getting great engagement? In that case, you may want to check in regarding the availability of your participants, make an agreement together to extend and continue the momentum, or plan to simply revisit the conversation at another time. Please do not assume that people can extend their time with you just because the vibes are high. Check in and act accordingly.

Allow others to set boundaries.

Personal and professional boundaries (like value promises) always need to be set and held. Encourage team dynamics that enable them. Consider using prompts like these to get clear on expectations and the boundaries needed around them:

– What will you/we need to be successful in this project?

– When do we expect this to be completed?

– What needs to be reprioritized in order for this to be done with better flow?

– Considering the last time we took this on, what new boundaries do we need to add this time to collaborate more effectively?

– What is needed to ensure that we have the capacity to take this on?

– How have we been doing with our value promises together, and where can we align better with each other?

Create space for recognition.

It’s always a good rule of thumb to praise more than you criticize. A great way to get in the habit of that is to always hold space for recognition in your meetings, even if they consist of just you and someone else. I once worked at a nonprofit that had shoutouts on the top of the agenda of every meeting. We’d open the floor to anyone who wanted to recognize someone or something. It would sound like, “I want to give Chenire a shout-out for living our value of collaboration. She had my back when I needed assistance seeing the bigger picture. She really helped me to understand what I was missing in order to complete the project.”

Break into small-group conversations for perspective.

As much as you can, avoid making your meetings feel like lectures. If there’s one person talking the whole time, label it properly as a presentation versus a team meeting. Recognize that not everyone feels comfortable with speaking up in real time on the spot. Create experiences that ignite more psychological safety and connection between team members. Whenever appropriate, pause in your meeting and have people turn to those next to them (or put them in online breakout rooms) to provide insight and feedback on the topic at hand. The more you can break up the feeling of a talking head, the more engaged participants will be beyond the meeting itself.

A meeting is most rewarding when participants receive new information from the facilitator and in turn they provide a new perspective on or insight into what was presented. Instead of simply talking at people for your allotted time. What if you instead talked with them about the matter at hand? Consider your usual monthly all-staff meeting where people typically report out the latest in their departments. What might be possible if, after every section, you had a five-minute pair-share with someone about how that information resonated with you and how your team could support its viability? Many new possibilities would be ignited because you’d invite people to digest and absorb the information instead of just hearing it and moving on.

Give permission to be human.

We all have a lot going on in our lives that our colleagues will never know about. When someone is having a bad day, do what you can to check in with them. Something like, “Hey, Cory, I just wanted to check in to see if everything was OK?”. Can go a long way if you care about their answer.

One of my former CEOs did just that with me after a team meeting where he sensed I was off. Asking me to stay behind, I burst into tears and shared how much I regretted not attending my uncle’s memorial service because it was campaign season and I didn’t want to let my team down. He shared his regrets and empathized with the internal guilt that had been keeping me up at night. Although it didn’t take that pain away from me, it gave me permission to be human, seen, and understood.

Are you a conscious leader looking to transform your workplace culture?

This was an excerpt from MaryBeth’s book – Permission to Be Human: The Conscious Leaders Guide to Creating a Values-Driven Culture.

Learn more from this company culture book on how to make team meetings more engaging today.

Or take our core values quiz to find out what are your values. corevaluesquiz.com