Team meetings are essential to running a successful business. The entire team needs to have effective communication. We get asked a lot about how often and how long meetings should happen. Here are some tips:

• The best day of the week is typically Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Monday is often too busy catching up from the weekend and Friday is busy with tying up loose ends, as well as team members potentially being exhausted from the week.
• Morning hours tend to work best. This allows for minimal disruption of your productive time, and at a time where everyone comes in focused.
• Come prepared with an agenda. This keeps everyone on track and makes you prepare for a meeting ahead of time.
• Structure your agenda around 45 minutes – One-hour time period. Anything longer, employees will start to think of other tasks they need to be completing.
• What topics should be covered?
  1. Results – Review business statistics and goals. This generally takes 15 minutes. When reporting results, go over what the goal was, what the actual result was, discussion, and thoughts to improve.
  2. Projects/Tasks – What upcoming project or tasks are ahead? What is the plan of action? What is the update on that plan? The core of your meeting should revolve around this topic – plan for 30 minutes.
  3. Education – Most employees want to learn new things. Pick a topic you can discuss for 10-15 minutes that will shed new light on what your business does.
• Have a central location where meeting notes can be found and reviewed if needed. This also allows for you to keep any documents important to the company in one place for everyone to access easily.

Sarah Allshouse, Assistant Controller