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1. Nominate a Delegate CEOs typically are so focused on top priorities—meeting growth targets, building a management team, streamlining manufacturing—that they don't put much thought into meetings. But fixing the companywide meeting doesn't have to take a lot of your time. At Timbuk2, the CEO delegated the problem to the office manager, whose role as a link between management and employees made her the right person to plan and facilitate more collaborative meetings. |
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2. Consider the Setting Hold the meeting in a space where employees can be relaxed and comfortable. All attendees should have a clear view of the meeting leader, and vice versa. If the meeting includes a visual display, make it big enough that everyone can see it. |
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3. Welcome People You don't have to be as smart as Google's founders to know that employees appreciate good food. It's a standard practice of hosts across time and cultures: Welcome attendees with snacks and drinks. |
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4. Set a Clear Purpose Is the point of the meeting to broadcast general information? To discuss a specific topic? To give employees a chance to ask questions? Whatever the purpose, it should be clearly thought through and communicated. Timbuk2 CEO Perry Klebahn originally conceived of the weekly meeting as a chance for staffers to get company news and ask hard questions, but his employees experienced them as a series of boring team status reports and rarely spoke. Klebahn has since clarified the purpose of the meeting—"it's about building a tribe, not broadcasting information," he says—and conveyed that to his staff both explicitly and, by moving from an announcement format to an open discussion, implicitly. |
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5. Aim for 100% Participation Organizations perform better when they have high levels of employee participation and engagement. The meeting is a chance to set the tone for that. At Timbuk2, the office manager put up a bulletin board in the kitchen area where she posted discussion topics (Should pets be allowed in the office? etc.) and gathered general feedback. This helped set the meeting agenda and catalyzed discussion. During the meeting, the leader tried to draw out people who hadn't spoken up, and the executive team measured the success of the meeting in part by how close they had come to 100% participation. |
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6. Don't Just Broadcast Information You don't need a meeting for one-way communication. Meetings should inspire, excite, and involve. They should be less like a PowerPoint presentation and more like a performance. Aim for an experience that will leave employees feeling better about working for your company. |
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7. Create Cultural Rituals Create rituals that celebrate and reinforce the values and culture of the company. Timbuk2 employees now fill out a personal questionnaire covering their favorite rock band, hobbies, and so on, and at every meeting, a randomly selected employee gets a custom designed bag, based on their answers. "The ritual reinforces that we make stuff, that we're a creative company, that we care about individuals," says Klebahn. "It also gets lots of laughs." |
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8. Iterate After each meeting, key executives and managers should do a brief post-mortem: What worked? What didn't? What feedback have we gotten? How can we improve? Treat the meeting as a work in progress. Based on employee input, Timbuk2's office manager continues to make changes, most recently shifting the format from a weekly 30-minute meeting on Wednesday at 11 a.m. to a biweekly 90-minute gathering at 3:30. |
How to Improve Your Companywide Meeting
Follow Timbuk2's playbook to run the best meetings possible
By Jessie Scanlon
Meetings both reflect and reinforce a company's culture, and in many cases, they send unintended messages. Seemingly small facts about how the meeting is run have tremendous symbolic power: Are there enough chairs? Are new employees introduced? How is the leader's body language? Be conscious of these issues and approach a meeting as an opportunity to demonstrate and reward the values and behaviors you want to encourage. You want staffers to leave every meeting feeling better, not worse, about working for your company.