How often have you put off having team meetings because let’s face it, you have enough of them scheduled in your calendar already, most of which take up valuable time with very little output? Well, let me tell you about a client who has shaken things up a bit when it comes to employee engagement and who has implemented a new style of meeting that has everyone buzzing.

This client of mine, let’s call him Adam, had been complaining to me about the lack of empathy between department heads when it comes to work scheduling and prioritisation. He always seemed to find himself on the receiving end of rash promises and random decisions which, were usually the result of someone making promises to a customer that they had no way of knowing Adam’s team could keep.

During one of our coaching sessions, Adam wanted to focus on possible strategies that he could employ to improve communication across departments; to engender a mutual respect and an increased awareness of the challenges other departments are facing. Adam came up with the idea of a daily 15 minute virtual meeting (no more, no less) with a representative from each department required to attend. Anyone can represent the team, depending on who’s available at their PC to join the video link, but that of course means yesterday’s representative has to brief today’s attendee and it also means that progress has to be made within 24 hours otherwise someone is left to answer for the team’s lack of progress in the next meeting.

You may be thinking that daily is too much and 15 minutes not enough and Adam questioned this himself until he tried it. He was two weeks into this new initiative when we next got together and he was astounded by the amount of invaluable information these meetings had already highlighted. They’d flagged gaps in existing processes, inaccessibility of senior management and personal interests being prioritised over business requirements amongst other things. Far from being a negative exercise, there have already been several positive outputs including an increased visibility in communications, questions and answers no longer being repeated and a reduction in frustrations between departments. Perhaps the most telling output of all is that these punchy meetings have demonstrated just how much people in the organisation know!

This begs the question:

“How many of your people are keeping themselves under the radar?”

Is this because they’re afraid of ownership or because you’re holding onto too much and not giving them a chance to show what they can do? Adam always tried to make time to communicate with his colleagues one-to-one but he’s been blown away by the power of communicating across teams on a regular basis. He’s excited by the number of business improvements this new process is facilitating and whilst that remains the case there is no reason to stop them any time soon. What’s more, his peer group agree.

The daily micro meeting has a lot to offer as Adam has proved, and the idea was conceived in less than the 15 minutes required to see one through from start to finish!

If you want to benefit from the business improvements that good employee engagement brings, call us on 0161 866 8573. We’ll help you to identify those strategies that uniquely work for you.