4 ways to make your meetings more interesting

Meetings can get boring and uninteresting quickly, filling your employees with either a sense of dread or annoyance that they have to put aside other work to partake in the meeting.

But meetings don’t need to be dull – with a few easy changes you can make your meetings much more interesting and, at the same time, make sure everyone’s taking something away from them.

1. Start at strange times

If you organise your daily or even weekly meeting for 10am you might want to rethink your time. Not that there’s anything wrong with this time specifically. But when you say 10am to your staff, they’ll take it as ‘around 10am’ and loiter in at 10 past.

A simple way to fix this is to change it to 9.56am. By giving a very specific starting time, it shows that this is when the meeting starts. Not 5 or 10 minutes after, but at 9.56am. It also makes the meeting stand out and people are more likely to remember it.

2. Introduce a new face

You’ve probably got a core group of staff you meet with regularly and will pretty much know by now who is going to say what, who’ll bring most to the table and those who are going to just turn up.

Bring in a new face to shake things up. It could be someone from outside the company who can offer a few insights or even just a colleague from another department.

It’s useful and interesting for people in sales to know how the accounts team works, or to get an insight into how your product is being sold by front of house workers.

3. Take it in different directions

You’ve got to keep thing fresh when it comes to regular meetings. But you don’t need to go crazy by bringing in a clown or holding talks in the pub. A simple change of direction can keep your staff engaged.

Instead of just using them for catch ups, you could use meetings for:

• Idea generation – from potential new clients to better ways of working, nothing is off the table
• Singling out the work of one person – if someone has brought in a new contract or delivered a project ahead of time, ask them about how they did it and any advice they have for the team
• Day-to-day office life – you don’t always have to cover the big issues. By talking about things like the coffee machine or parking, you show you are interested in your workers as people.

4. Get personal

It’s nice to be friends with the people you work with, but sometimes with the pressure of deadlines, family life and daily commutes being able to socialise with work colleagues can be difficult.

Have a meeting where everyone just talks about their out of work life – what are their interests, hobbies, any problems.

By doing this you’ll also be able to find out if any of your staff have hidden skills like they’re a whizz with social media or can speak another language.

Posted by Ashleigh Sharp