It’s Monday morning. You’re sipping your coffee, catching up on email and then it hits you: it’s time for the weekly meeting.
Eye roll. Grab your laptop or phone and your coffee and head to the conference to slog through another Monday morning meeting.
Who doesn’t get a bit of the Monday blues?
But wouldn’t it be better if the Monday morning scrum wasn’t part of a dreaded start to the week?
Get rid of the long, tiresome weekly meeting. Instead, replace it with an energizing, focused meeting that sets the tone for each week.
Remember, meetings help businesses share information among employees, discuss upcoming deadlines and provide details about changes or additions to the workload.
Before an employee even sits down (or perhaps stands!) for a meeting, energize the room by playing your faviourite inspirational song to announce the meeting is starting.
Who doesn’t love a good “Eye of the Tiger” to invigorate the room with a good vibe?
Perhaps you allow the employees to select a different song each week, or feel free to try out different music genres to see what works best for your team.
Maybe it’s not music, but rather a coffee and tea bar to get the morning buzz flowing.
If you have a small team, there’s even an opportunity to change up the location—instead of a traditional conference room, try reserving a small room at a coffee shop or a back table.
Executives, be sure to treat your staff. (Don’t want to hear any grumbling about being forced to buy coffee and makes the process faster!)
Rather than trying to cover everything under the sun or spending an hour discussing one project (unless that is the true focus for the week), then use these Mondays to zero in on exactly what the priorities are for this week.
Take only the time necessary to communicate to the team the top goals for the week and how each person plays into that week’s plan.
Note – for some businesses, they may even do this daily subject to the nature of the work they do.
This isn’t the meeting to talk about the step by step details of what you need to do this week, like call these three customers.
Rather, it’s about the big rocks.
Cover the 1, 2, 3 “rocks” to focus on, discuss any blockers, anything that you might need help or support with and then wrap it up.
Don’t let the meeting drag on—that’s a big no-no for a scrum or stand up.
Each person should be talking no longer than two minutes or so. Keeping it to just a quick outline will help keep the distractions to a minimum.
Note: The person running this meeting needs to have that element of quickness.
Depending on how that person operates, it might be walking around, giving a high five to each person to indicate the turn is over. Or even being able to gently interrupt and say, “Excellent,” and turning your attention to the next person.
Wellness Tip: Some people also use this meeting to do their ‘warm up’ for the day…ie do their back/arm/neck and wrist stretches.
The other portion of this meeting should be a chance to cover high level business topics—changes in products, new focus or clients, brand strategy and more or it may be case studying a positive example from the team about how they achieve their success ie role play or sharing learnings.. This should be under 5 minutes though.
Whatever it might be, this is the time to give a quick overview of any upcoming changes or shifts in the business.
And, keep in mind, this extra part doesn’t have to happen every week. No one will complain if the meeting ends early!
Don’t miss this chance to end the scrum each week with win from last week. Highlight someone who did something above and beyond.
Watch your employees smile and walk out feeling good about themselves or patting their co-workers on the back. It starts the work week out with good energy, and it might motivate people to achieve because they want to be the It Person next week.
OK, now that you’re running awesome, short, productive Monday scrums, then check out my tool that will help you run other types of meetings, such as a fortnightly team meeting or a quarterly strategy review.
Try my Perfect Meeting Agenda Template. Apply this simple, yet effective meeting agenda to your meetings:
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