According to Effective Meetings.com, “When the average employee is asked to attend another meeting during their busy day, the natural response is to run like the wind or at least fake a scheduling conflict. ingesting a little fun into your meetings might be just the right thing to encourage participation and creativity.”
Only Call Meetings When Necessary
Meetings are necessary to bring the staff together, to discuss goals and to be sure that everyone is on one accord. However, if you just call a meeting just to talk about a long list of issues, that is simply a waste of your time.
Establish a goal for your meeting and make it a teachable moment. Meetings are a great way to train staff, invite staff to share and laugh together.
Sample Meeting Agenda
Twice a month I create a 30-minute meeting agenda and I only focus on 3-5 topics. The main focus of my meetings is to discuss classroom practices, review quality care indicators and to get feedback from my staff. Here is an example of how I conduct my meetings:
Topics:
1. Share Positive News/Praise/Share funny stories
2. Review what we discussed at last meeting and progress
3. Quality Care Discussion: Promoting self-help skills, Art Activities, Issue handouts
4. Our next meeting, Upcoming events
5. Staff feedback
Having a meeting agenda helps you to stay on track and gives the meeting a focus. I really believe that my staff view our meetings as a time of fellowship, because we simply chat about the programs goals, their desires and we enjoy coming together in a fun and professional manner.
My meetings have not always been fun and interesting. Several years ago, I had a teacher that would bring her work to the meetings and I literally stopped the meeting to tell her, that she must be attentive to what is being said at the meeting. She was there in body and not there in spirit.
This encouraged me to develop my meeting management skills and to get to the point. Moreover, I learned to never share bad news at meetings and to keep it positive.
Save negative or sensitive information for private meetings, unless the news affects the entire team.
5 Ways to Liven up Meetings
- Hold meetings after Lunch breaks
- Always have something funny to share
- Praise staff members as a group, tell them how proud you are of them
- Be understanding
- Let them know the purpose of the meeting and what you need for them to do
- Maintain good eye contact of each employee
- Invite feedback
- Invite staff to share Professional Development Success
- Problem solve as a team
- Conduct meetings as a Huddle; call the plays and encourage them to carry them out!
Feel free to share your thoughts about this blog post.
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