How often do you meet with your staff? Are the meetings productive? Successful? In my experience as an Executive Pastor, I went through many iterations of attempting to have great staff meetings. While I wouldn’t say I ever got it “perfect,”, I would say we did a pretty good job with it.
We met every Wednesday at noon and began with a brown bag lunch. In my experience, here’s what I would say are the top 5 “keys” to having successful staff meetings:
- Have a Start and Stop Time – Begin the meeting on time and end the meeting on time. Create an “on time” culture and insist that everyone be at the table and ready at the start time. Also, respect everyone’s schedule by managing the time well and ending the meeting on time.
- Have a Formal Agenda – Preferably a day before the meeting, publish a formal agenda. It’s important that the staff know what’s on the agenda and even have an opportunity to get things on the agenda.
- Develop A “Schedule Of Topics” – We met every Wednesday. To make sure certain things were always covered, we created a schedule of topics. For example, in the 2nd meeting of the month, we would review our strategic plan. Each staff member gave an update on where they stood with their key tactics. To keep the meeting on schedule, each person had a strict 5-minute limit!
- Have A Meal Together – Everyone brought their own lunch for the meeting. We believed it was important that the team had at least 1 meal together each week.
- Have Fun! – We always tried to keep it fun. For the first 10 or 15 minutes of the meeting, while we were eating, it was just having fun together. On our schedule of topics, the 5th meeting of the month (when it happened) was a “fun day.” We would usually get out of the office to do something fun together instead of the other meetings’ formal agenda.