Whether your team holds meetings daily, weekly, or hardly at all, you might have wondered how you can make them more interesting. While it’s important to remain professional and stick to the task at hand, finding ways to make meetings more appealing can help your team feel more alert, creative, and engaged.
Here are four ideas to help make meetings more interesting for everyone.
Step out of the boardroom
Whenever possible, try holding meetings in a different spot than you usually do – try a local coffeeshop, park, or other location that’s nearby and comfortable. A change of scenery can have a revitalizing effect on your team, especially if they are used to the same meeting room every time. New ideas and increased creativity may result.
Try daily stand-up meetings
No, we don’t mean stand-up comedy – we mean regular, super-quick meetings held standing up. These short meetings may sound like a weird idea, but agile teams love them for productivity and focus. A study at Stanford Business School showed that, when meetings were held standing up and taking 10-20 minutes, decisions took 34% less time to make, with no noticeable difference in the quality of the decision.
Keep in mind that daily stand-up meetings are not intended for strategic, big-picture topics. They’re best for fleshing out daily tasks and responsibilities. You may want to supplement daily stand-up meetings with longer, more traditional ones.
Ban meetings for one day
Are you having hour-long meetings twice a week out of habit? Are you hearing grumbling amongst your employees about meeting frequency, length, or repetition? If so, you may want to try setting aside one day a week that is always meeting-free. This way, your team can count on at least one day when they can put their heads down and actually do the work that the regular meetings may be preventing. This way, when you do have to meet (and do try to only hold meetings when it’s necessary), your team will actually have plans and results to report on.
Make it a team effort
One easy way to help make meetings more interesting for everyone involved is to get everyone involved. We’re not saying put each of your employees on the spot my making them prepare a speech, but find ways to foster collaboration and discussion. This can be as simple as speaking in your own words and not reading off an agenda. Or, if you want to get a little fancy, you can encourage brainstorming at your next planning meeting – have everyone spend five minutes writing down ideas without editing, then go around the room and ask people to read their one or two best ideas. One person’s thought might spark an idea in another person, and soon your meeting will be productive as well as exciting.
What are your favourite tips for making business meetings interesting?
Perhaps the question should be “Can creativity be re-learned?” Many studies of creativity in children and adults show that children are more creative than adults. Why is this?