How to Make Your Daily Meetings More Fun

 

Do you know why your meetings rarely stand-up? Why do most people in business fail to set goals, close deals, and come up with strategies to make things happen? All of these things are missing from your daily meeting. They just seem to happen "naturally" during business days. Your meetings are supposed to help you get more done, but how can you automate them so you can stand-up more often?

Here's the answer: daily meetings should be stand-up events! Instead of a brief PowerPoint presentation, run three questions each day that will lead you to the next step. Think of these questions as mini-adults that will ask you questions about how you're managing your tasks, problems you're facing, what you're learning about the project, etc. Then, answer the questions with an example to illustrate your point.

As part of the goals for your team, create a space where team members can go to interact with one another. You can create a space where people can submit their status updates, for example, or where team members can view the daily meetings that are being distributed. This space can be used for short conversations, like asking a question about the status updates that have been posted. You can also make this space a collaborative area where people can brainstorm solutions to problems and where you can collect short stories or progress reports from your distributed teams.

When you use daily meetings as stand-up events, it is easy to keep all of your distributed teams up to speed. You don't need to spend a long time answering questions about what's going on or reporting progress. Instead, your distributed teams will know what's happening at the same time, and you can quickly circulate new information to everyone within your company.

How can you use daily meetings to streamline your process? Every team member on every team has different skills, so it's easy for some of them to know more about a particular task than others. For example, if you have product managers, then it's likely that some of your team members don't know a lot about the product, and they might be better suited to be part of the marketing team. When you distribute stand-up events, you can tell the product managers that they should be the ones hosting the event, since they're the experts on the task at hand. They'll also gain some important visibility in their given market space by making themselves available for the stand-ups.

Another way that you can use daily meetings to streamline your processes is to use them to encourage team participation. If you've had an entire team sit down for an hour to discuss the day's activities, then you've probably done a good job of creating an environment where all participants feel welcome to huddle together. However, you might need to add a small flourish to your meeting, such as a brief question and answer session where the team members can swap thoughts with one another.

15 minutes after the meeting is over, you should encourage team members to discuss what they did, how they felt, or what they planned to do the next day. You can even award some points based on their suggestions! This will give everyone a sense of ownership over the activity, and it will make your events more enjoyable for everyone. While you may have had your team members meet for an hour each day for the past several months, it's time to vary your meetings up a bit to keep the momentum going.Learn more about Standup Bot for Slack here.

Finally, you should encourage group participation. If you've always used face-to-face meetings, you can still adapt your schedule to accommodate the people in your team. Fifteen minutes after the end of the meeting, ask everyone to stand up and tell the group how important they are to the organization. Then, for 15 minutes to an hour, let each team member to speak about what a great job he or she did while playing an important role. These are just some of the ideas you can use to make your meetings more interactive and fun!