Liven up your team meetings

Team meetings are the cornerstone of team dynamics and team relationships so it’s important to make your meetings relevant, meaningful and enjoyable.  Even good team meetings can start to feel a little formulaic if you follow a fixed agenda every time, so here’s a few ideas to liven things up.

 Skill sharing.  Make space in the meeting for a team member to do a short masterclass on a skill they have.  These can be skills which although not essential to everyone’s daily job, might open up new ways of working or insights.  For example, how to use technical features in spreadsheets, how to draft a compelling article, simple coding.  Learning something new and slightly outside your comfort zone is an excellent way to spend time at a team meeting and to bond with your colleagues.  It also allows the person sharing their skills to take the spotlight, grow in confidence and practise their presentation skills. 

 Warm-up tune. There’s nothing like a piece of uplifting music to reset your mood and break the ice. As you’re waiting for everyone to show up to the meeting, including online, it’s sometimes awkward to know what to chat about and when to get started.  Fill that time with music!  You can take it in turns to pick the tune and have that playing as people are joining the meeting.  It will make people feel relaxed and set the tone for the meeting ahead. 

 Stand up. Office work is largely sedentary and as we know sitting down for long periods is bad for your health.  So experiment with having all or part of your team meetings standing up (for those who can). Having the whole meeting standing up will help keep the meeting focused and concise.  And for longer meetings, you could suggest standing up for alternate agenda items to help maintain energy and concentration levels. This is  something you can do in hybrid or remote meetings as well as in person. 

 Brainstorm.  Team meetings are a good opportunity to share ideas, test people’s feelings on an issue and solve problems. Rather than going round the table collecting people’s views, throw out the question or problem and then ask everyone to write down their ideas on a piece of paper.  Then ask them to turn that into a paper aeroplane and chuck it across the room.  Everyone gets up and finds an aeroplane that’s not their own and reads out the idea. Bringing some fun and physical movement into a team meeting helps create a more open atmosphere for discussing ideas and this exercise also allows everyone (including the quieter team members) to make their contribution heard. 

 Cut the meeting short. There’s often a lot of meetings in a working day.  Team meetings are great but on occasion it can feel a real treat, if there’s not actually much to discuss, to have a meeting end unexpectedly early or be cancelled.  Consider if there is the odd time you can do this and then ask team members to use the time wisely and report back. You could use the extra time for a personal development activity, to go for a walk or socialise with a colleague.  Way more energising than having a meeting you don’t really need to have. 

I hope you enjoy these ideas and do let me know how you like to liven up your team meetings.

Sarah Cookson

Personal development and team building