Team meetings – just about every team in every industry in the world has them, but just how beneficial are they? A team meeting can be a motivational, morale boosting session where everybody gets to share what they are doing. A great forum for new ideas, a powerful way of working together to solve problems, identify better ways of working, and a fast and effective way to cascade management information down. But when managed or timed badly, it is unproductive drain on your team’s time.
Team meetings have a cost – make it count
Whether it is an hour once a week or ten minutes every day, a recruitment team meeting has a cost to your recruitment company in terms of the time every member of the team spends doing it. Multiply the average hourly rate of every person present by the number of people there and you’ll have an idea of what that cost is, but of course, this doesn’t take into account that your team isn’t billing for the business because they are in a meeting room instead of placing candidates. Appreciate that cost, and make sure that the value the team gets from the meetings is worth it. Think of your recruiter meetings as an investment rather than a cost.
Know what your team think
Do your team think that the current format of your team meetings is beneficial, or do they see it as an annoying thing that they have to go to that takes them away from their work?
Your team may not be too ready to criticise the way things are done in front of you. If you ask for some honest feedback about the way your team meets and shares information and encourage them to tell you what they really think, you may find that they don’t currently feel like the meetings help them. Alternatively, they may really enjoy the meetings, but for different reasons than you might have thought. Good team meetings are about sharing ideas and giving everybody input, so the planning of the meetings should also reflect what everybody wants.
Time management
What time you have your meeting should suit the style of the meeting. If it is a fast update meeting designed to share information and get everybody fired up and ready to go, then first thing in the morning is ideal. If it is a more relaxed weekly session where you celebrate some achievements and discuss some new ideas, then this can be a good way to use that last hour on a Friday afternoon when people tend to be at their least productive and clients are harder to track down. Whatever you do, make sure that your meetings never cut into the prime calling time for reaching people in your recruitment sector, and also that you keep an eye on the clock and don’t allow them to overrun. If this happens all the time, you are either losing control of the meetings or you need to make the actual sessions longer.
