ROC Weekly Management & Mindset Segment

Tips and Tricks for Effective Team Meetings for Your Rehab Center

Meetings are a necessary part of any business, and when done correctly, can be a productive way to mobilize your team and make effective business decisions.

Team meetings are also an important tool for team building, aligning your team to business goals, strategizing, and collaborating. They can be used to review goals or establish new ones, provide recognition for good work, brainstorm ideas for projects and goals, and discuss challenges and determine a plan to overcome them.

While meetings are very common, many people don’t know how to run them effectively, leading to wasted time and frustration.

Tips to make your team meetings more productive

Here is a list of tips you can use to help make your team meetings more effective:

Connect with everyone in the room

The purpose of a meeting is to have a productive discussion. Make eye contact and direct your conversation to everyone in the room to encourage sharing of ideas and to keep everyone engaged.

Focus on collaboration rather than reporting

Rather than sharing a ton of information in a team meeting, consider sending it to your employees before you meet. This allows everyone to read it in their own time and have discussions about it in the meeting, rather than simply learning about it.

Ask for input

When creating your meeting agenda, ask for input from your team. This is will help employees discuss issues that are important to them and help everyone feel respected and heard.

Encourage contributions from everyone

Create an environment where everyone feels comfortable to speak. Be sure to call out interrupters in the group to help encourage balanced conversation. You can first start by asking your team before the meeting if they have anything to share. Then, in the meeting agenda, you can make time slots for these individuals. You can also ask if anyone has anything to share during the meeting by going around the group, individual by individual. Try to ask strategic questions to encourage conversation.

Create an agenda

Outline what you plan to accomplish during the meeting and the objectives you hope to achieve. Once this is created, send it to meeting attendees one day prior to the meeting. Here is a list of items an effective meeting agenda includes:

• schedule

• location

• attendees

• purpose

Be sure to allocate some time for open discussion and include it at the end of the agenda. This will give you time to ask for any remaining questions without going over-your scheduled time.

Assign roles

Assigning roles to meeting attendees can help ensure you address all tasks. For instance, you may need someone who is responsible for taking notes, time keeping, addressing interrupters, etc.

Announce agenda progression throughout the meeting

As the meeting progresses, mention where you are on the agenda. When you finish each topic, be sure to recap the conclusions or decisions that were made to help attendees internalize what was discussed and refocus them as you move to the next item.

Discuss topics that impact the whole team

Be sure to only invite people that are necessary for the meeting. While it might seem like a courtesy to include some people regardless of their necessity to the conversation, it is a better use of time to only include the people the absolutely need to be there. Once you gather your group, follow your agenda to help ensure each person’s time is being used wisely. This will help improve focus during the meeting.

End the meeting with action items

Concluding a meeting is an important aspect of leading it. Be sure to provide a summary of the main points and decisions that were made and establish next steps. If there are deadlines for any tasks, be sure to mention them as well.

Send a meeting recap

Have someone send out a recap of the meeting, including any action items that were discussed. This will help your team members have a clear outline of the tasks that are their responsibility.

Follow up on action items

Remember that the point of a meeting is not only to discuss plans for the team, but to actually implement them. Follow up with your team members on any action items that were determined to remind them of the tasks and encourage action.

If you are interested in joining the ROC community, please complete this form for consideration: https://tinyurl.com/5btxe39z