It has been close to 10 years since Weekdone started providing teams like yours with world leading OKR software. And now we’re brining you Team Compass, team management software.
Weekdone Team Compass is just $29/month for teams of 4 + users, with a free 2-week trial, of course! Not to mention it’s completely free for teams of 3 or less. We really want to make your management processes easier, so you can move into the more important things with your team!
If there is one core thing every team leader does, it’s running regular team meetings. How you do it may vary. In good old days we all met for a physical meeting in one room.
Today, with remote and hybrid teams, the meetings are often run via video calls. Some replace or enhance them with online meeting management tools.
Often though the weekly team meetings turn into a mess. There is no agenda, ideas get lost, people come unprepared and time is wasted. To avoid that, you need structure and thinking ahead.
Here is what we’ve learned from 10 years of building software that thousands of teams across the world use to prepare, run and summarize their weekly meetings.
- Define the backbone for you meeting agenda. What usually works is to first cover long-term goals and objectives, move to KPIs update and then do a person by person progress, plans, problems round-up.
- Make sure everyone prepares ahead. It’s most important people have taken notes on what they got done that week and what their plans for next week are. This notes should be available for everyone to see and read during the meeting.
- See how long-term goals and objectives are doing. While weekly plans and progress is important, look at the big picture. Often quarterly objectives are set on team level, in which case the team leader should update their key results and progress before the meeting.
- Cover your KPIs. Someone must make sure before the meeting your key metrics are updated and can be discussed. And remember, key means just few top numbers. Be focused. Celebrate the wins, but discuss numbers that are behind.
- Summarize last week’s accomplishments. Often this is the most fun part of the team meeting: each person telling what their wins for the week were.
- Check on last week’s promises. What often happens is people promise to do a lot of stuff, but those promises somehow vanish. You must write down those promises and go through them one by one during the next meeting. Hold people responsible.
- Write down action plans and next steps for each person. Too often ideas are thrown in the air but nobody takes responsibility for them. If your team agrees on something to be a good idea to execute on, assign it to a person as their responsibility for next week.
- Discuss problems and find solutions. It’s good if people come prepared with a list of issues and problems they encountered during the week. Taking notes during the week helps. Often problems are between co-workers, so the meeting is the best time to find solutions.
- Make sure everyone gets covered. When doing a round-up, make sure each employee has their say. Too often only the most extroverted people speak. As a team leader, make sure everyone speaks up one by one.
- Take some discussions to 1:1s later. It’s common for team meetings to become too long. To keep meetings on time, take anything that takes proportionally too much time to a 1:1 discussion or smaller team meeting later.
We promise: by doing these things, your next team meeting will be much more effective and productive.
To structure it all, our team and Weekdone has created Team Compass, a full team management software suite. It covers all the areas you would run in a meeting: from goals and objectives to weekly plans, progress and problems, followed by 1:1 chats between the employee and manager. Our software ensures employees come prepared to each meeting, and know exactly the talking points to move you into more strategic discussions. You can try it out for free here.