We often find ourselves sitting in meeting after meeting listening to a select few people talk at us, while the rest of the room are merely regarded as a pair of ears instead of important contributors. This can happen for several reasons; whether you have work or personal things on your mind, you don’t want to bring attention to yourself or just believe your boss doesn’t want to hear your point of view. 

Whatever the reason why, this type of one-way reporting is common in our everyday work lives and means that a huge number of potentially valued solutions, views and information are never shared with the team. It’s common to feel useless and undervalued in these situations.

How do we change this? One way to approach improving communication and collaboration during meetings is to perform a top to bottom review of your team's Operating Rhythm. Your Operating Rhythm is how you and your team work towards your business goals. This all comes from your meetings and the ideas you share with one another on a daily basis and so ensuring they are as productive and optimised as possible can be the difference between the team receiving their bonus at the end of the year or not!

We often find when working with businesses that their Operating Rhythm can be optimised to provide the best platform for all team members to contribute most effectively. This comes down to looking at what meetings are scheduled and when, how the information flow works now and how it can be altered to improve effectiveness, through to the details of agenda items and the individuals preparation before attending.

We often encourage businesses to start daily Huddle and Campaign Room meetings. The Daily Huddle is a short 15-minute stand-up meeting with a structured agenda to facilitate improved communication, collaboration and coordination. The Huddle allows day-to-day activities to run efficiently, reduce email traffic and duplication of effort, enable quick responses, identify timely opportunities, clear obstacles early and build a strong team. The Campaign Room is a meeting which enables the team to address all key issues and concerns aligned to the business’ goals. 

These two meetings, when run correctly, can reduce the need for subsequent meetings throughout the day and can cover the entire team's actions for the day in 30 minutes or less. This allows the team to spend less time discussing those goals and more time achieving them!

Employing a structured approach such as this promotes communication and collaboration with each member of the team having an important role to play, feeling valued and contributing more. These foundations will help you and your team to perform at an even higher standard and achieve your business goals more effectively.

Click the link here to see some case studies from businesses who found themselves in these situations and what actions they took to work towards their goals.