Make Your Meetings Meaningful by Adding 3 Special Ingredients

Photo by Rachid Oucharia on Unsplash

My team is made up of two full-time and 18 part-time staff members located on three continents. We have staff meetings once a month online. Like any staff meeting, there are always a number of topics to cover, and it takes time to consider how to make the meetings effective. 

I tend to focus on the outcomes I want to achieve and forget three things that are important to include regularly.  

1. Vision

If I were to start every meeting with our written vision statement, I imagine that would be very boring. And no one needs “boring” in a meeting. Even so, we regularly need to be reminded of the goal, the vision, that hoped-for end goal that inspires us to work hard.

To kick off strategic planning meetings this year, I shared again where I believe See Beyond is headed, and at the encouragement of our outside facilitator, I shared our vision in a new way using images. The highlight of many, at the end of that first meeting, was being re-motivated by See Beyond’s vision and now having some visuals to go with it. 

What’s your vision for your group? When was the last time the group heard it? How might you share it again in a new way? 

“We regularly need to be reminded of the goal, the vision, that hoped-for end goal that inspires us to work hard.”

2. Variety

Our minds are attracted to novelty. It’s why we can’t sleep in a new place with new sounds—our minds want to be alert to them. So when we desire alert and engaged participants in our meetings, adding some variety can be just what is needed.    

We can add variety by changing settings, mixing up who facilitates, varying the methods we use for discussion or decisions, and including important reasons we meet that often get neglected (like building community or capacity or working through conflict). We can also invite guests to join or facilitate our meetings. Rather than being distracting, adding variety can actually enhance the outcomes. In one of our recent meetings, we made a low-stakes decision by actually rolling dice! 

In what ways could your meetings benefit from increased variety? Where would your members most like to change things up? What’s not really working well that might need a new approach to break open effectiveness? 

“When we desire alert and engaged participants in our meetings, adding some variety can be just what is needed.”

3. Celebration

We work hard. We sacrifice for the vision we’ve bought into. We see a few things go well, but there is always some other thing that needs attention right away. Perhaps you face the challenges of being a multicultural team or the pressures of operating outside of your passport country, which pulls your attention and draws on your energy. On top of that, our brains are wired to see the negative. So, if you are like me, you often neglect to stop to celebrate what’s going well. Chances are that both you and your team members could benefit from stopping to notice the wins along the way.  

It was so encouraging in our recent strategic planning meetings to start with what the milestones were in the past year for each sub-group. It was motivating, uplifting, and strengthening to see all that had happened. It gave us the energy we needed to look at some of the harder topics.   

There are so many ways to include celebration. We can ask “What went well?” “What do we need to celebrate?” “I’d like to make a toast to . . . “ We can write wins on balloons and let them drift around the room, or do a chatbox explosion of things to be thankful for. The only limit to ways to celebrate is your imagination. 

What little wins could you draw out in your next meeting? Who on your team could help the team creatively celebrate some big win? How can you remember to include celebrations more often in your meetings? 

“Chances are that both you and your team members could benefit from stopping to notice the wins along the way.”

Adding too much vision, variety, and celebration may just become another boring routine. But sprinkling these regularly throughout your meeting agendas can bring significant benefits in the areas of energy, engagement, and efficiency. 

I believe what made our recent series of virtual strategic planning so successful was that our outside facilitator successfully included these three areas of vision, variety, and celebration throughout. Now, I want to remember to do the same in this upcoming year's regular meetings.