5 steps to holding a spring cleaning meeting

Use the changing of the seasons to hold a spring cleaning meeting for a fresh start in 5 easy steps

After the post-Christmas rush is over and everyone’s finally settled back into their working routine, it’s a perfect time to take a step back and look at how your small business is doing.

Group of People Smiling

And a great way to do this is with a spring cleaning meeting. It’s an opportunity to get your staff together and iron out any wrinkles before they become major problems.

Here’s our 5 step guide to holding the perfect spring clean meeting…

Step 1: Air grievances
Often in small firms with low staff numbers, people won’t want to air any grievances for fear of rocking the boat. But if these aren’t handled they can fester and build to epic proportions, which a simple early intervention could have solved the issue.

Get your staff to email over any specific grievances before the meeting. Anything that you feel might be too personal or unsuitable for the meeting you can handle on a one-to-one basis. Otherwise, the floor will be open.

Step 2: Identify problems
Once everyone’s had their chance to tell everyone what they’re unhappy about, you can work as a team to identify the root of the problem.

For example, if someone believes the company is missing out on new work, try and find out why that is. Is your marketing not working, your pitching style off, or are you being priced out of the market?

Sometimes it can be hard to see the real problem, so try and get down to the basics. Keep going further back in the process until you see where things are going wrong.

Step 3: Come up with solutions
The next step is the hardest one – coming up with ways to solve any problems you’ve discovered. But if you’ve followed step 3 and identified the real cause of the problem, you’re half way to a solution already.

This is also why it’s good to have everyone involved in these meetings as you never know where the solution will come from. The more people, the more ideas.

People Working on Graphs

Step 4: Create goals
Think you’ve got a workable solution? Then it’s time to move on to the next step – creating goals. This could be anything from having the problem fixed within the month to small steps like discussing the solution with the appropriate head of department and seeing what needs to be done to take it forward.

Creating goals is important as people often think that by simply acknowledging the problem and finding a solution, the issue will magically disappear. As part of the goals, you need to assign tasks to people so things actually get done.

Step 5: Organise follow up meeting
And another important way to keep things moving forward is to organise a follow up meeting.

It could be next week, next month or every quarter, but you need to set a date and let everyone know what you expect to be accomplished by that time. Goals tend to be pointless unless you set a deadline for them.

Posted by Ashleigh Sharp

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