What Are You Meeting For? Creative, Focused Workplace Meetings
Single-focus meetings can be an effective way to dive deeper into an issue. When you have one central purpose, theme or goal tied to a meeting, chances are you’ll have a more effective meeting and achieve better results. Too often teams try to cram too many issues into their meetings, yet different topics often require different forums and different types of conversations to address them successfully. Here are a few different types of meetings you might want to try on for size in your workplace.
Daily Team Huddles: A great way to improve communication and strengthen your culture. No chairs, short and sweet. For more details visit Huddle Up!
Oops Meetings: Centiro Solutions, a Swedish software company, has a “failure club” that holds humorous meetings where people share their mistakes and what they learned in the 
process. By making the meetings very fun, they create an environment where people feel comfortable admitting their blunders so everyone can learn from them.
Best Practices Meetings: Try some best practices meetings focused on various topics. Have employees share their ideas for their best practices for achieving better work/life balance. Or best practices for managing stress at work, reducing conflicts with customers, or up-selling to clients
Chat n’ Chew Meetings: Beryl Health holds monthly “Chat n Chew” meetings where employees chow down with senior managers and are given the opportunity to ask any and all questions and share ideas or concerns.
Culture Club Meetings: If culture drives success, then make sure you hold dedicated meetings focused only on your culture where you encourage open and honest conversations around what’s working and what’s not working with your culture.
Reverse Meetings: One of my clients holds what they call “Reverse Meetings” where the newest team members create the agenda and facilitate the meeting. It gives new employees experience at facilitating meetings, and the meetings generate a completely fresh perspective on the workplace.
Whine and Cheese Meetings: Serve cheese and give everyone the opportunity to whine about something that’s not working for them at work, but in a funny exaggerated way so it becomes safe for everyone. For every whine, come up with at least two solutions so you can bottle the wine.
The Possibilities are Limitless Meetings: If you find that most of your meetings are focused on wrestling with issues and problem-solving, then every quarter or half a year hold a meeting where you only brainstorm future ideas and possibilities for your organization.Team Development Meetings: A regular checkpoint where you only talk about how your team is working as a team. Agree to one thing everyone on the team needs to start doing, one thing you need to do better, and one thing everyone needs to stop doing that will help take your teamwork to the next level of success.
Michael Kerr is a Hall of Fame international business speaker and the author of six books, including, most recently, “The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank.” www.HumoratWork.com
