It’s time to drop your weekly roundtable meeting

Apr 25

If you’ve been in business long enough you’ve likely experienced your share of weekly or monthly roundtable team meetings.

We typically show up, bleary-eyed, half engaged and listen to updates on company performance and initiatives, check in with coworkers we haven’t seen lately, and move on to our next client or internal meeting, with little accomplished in the way of improved team performance.

These meetings may have served a purpose years ago when our world was more stable, when we could meet in person, and frankly, had more capacity.

Teams that operate using old ways of working and outdated meetings are about as effective as a company memo. Even worse, roundtable meetings may be inadvertently contributing to stress and negatively impacting employee experience.

Accelerated pace due to emerging technologies and other innovations have created the need to build more resilient and adaptive teams, and changes to our workplace have been intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to HFS Research, COVID has shifted mindsets from resisting to demanding change. Leaders are recognizing a need for better integration between business, customers and technology and the urgency to develop skills and ways of operating (both virtual and physical).

HFS states that 50% of organizations are boosting investments in people, rethinking employee experiences and equipping managers to better lead diverse, hybrid teams. In this same study, 65% expect teams to learn on-the-job and the most sought-after skills include creativity, problem solving, communications, adaptability, and analytics.

As a result of this environment, your employees need every minute of their day, and then some, to get their day-to-day work done. Time is finite and the ways of working that teams have relied on in the past must evolve and be more aligned with changing customer preferences and keeping pace with change.

Success starts by developing an outside-in mindset and gaining intimate knowledge for how customers interact and are using your products or services. This can be done by harnessing customer networks and using data to uncover day-to-day problems impacting your customers and how they interact with your team.

Instead of hosting a weekly or monthly roundtable, why not create a team that continuously improves customer experiences?

One solution to creating adaptive, more resilient teams is to intentionally lead differently by adopting new and emerging workplace practices and team meetings.

Below are 5 steps to more effective meetings.

1) Work from a compelling team vision

Effective leaders have perspectives on where a team must head to achieve results and articulate a clear painted picture of what is possible and desirable and work to secure commitment from their people and teams.

A compelling vision incorporates emerging workplace practices that shift mindsets and energize teams about what’s next.

Whether you’re leading a small or large team your vision should be aligned with company direction and stretch your team to think differently about collaboration and taking ownership over issues and roadblocks.

A powerful vision:

· Creates positive team energy

· Provides meaning and purpose

· Opens teams up to experimentation

· Set standards for quality

· Connects your current and future state

2) Reimagine your meetings

Agile and design thinking emerged from the software industry and have evolved with rigid and complex processes and practices. These methods fail when teams do not first adopt mindsets around modifying meetings and continuously striving to identify and solve customer or team challenges.

Leaders have accountability for both the mindset and principles of agile and design thinking that will be most effective in your team. Teams can approach new ways of working using lean principles, starting small, and then scaling practices over time.

For example, you could start by selecting a customer or end user problem that you are trying to solve and use sprint planning meetings and huddle boards to track progress against solving the problem.

The key is to establish an environment and safe space to hold dialogue around customer problems, and the reward to solving an important team problem becomes a boost to employee experience.

Leaders give their teams permission to approach work differently and leverage coaching to encourage ownership when challenges emerge.

Incorporate new ways of working:

· Organize around customer value

· Focus on eliminating waste and delays

· Use a coach approach for motivation

· Provide space to experiment and learn

· Make it okay to test the status quo

3) Get to know your customers

We all have customers to serve whether it’s an external customer or customers within your organization. Your team exists to solve customer problems.

Effective teams explore how their customers are using their products or services and understand changing preferences that may be driven by new and emerging technologies.

Think of customers as a community that can be leveraged to reshape how your team identifies value through access to products and services, higher engagement, connectivity, customization, and opportunities to collaborate.

Digital can offer opportunities to tap into customer needs, empathize with those needs and co-create value through a range of different stakeholders and partners. Customers, both internal and external, demand more than a transactional relationship and seek shared creation of value.

Teams can harness customer networks to re-examine how decisions are made and strengthen relationships through co-designing solutions that identify and create new sources of value.

Imagine how rewarding this will be to your team.

Get to know your customers:

· Use social platforms to establish customer communities

· Create personas and journey maps

· Identify pain points, broken processes and bad technology

· Remove steps that don’t make sense or add value

· Debate the best ideas to improve customer experiences

4) Take ownership over challenges

Teams that take ownership over issues, challenges and problems are constantly learning on the job. As you learn about changing customer preferences you explore new ways to solve problems and learn new skills and build competencies.

Using agile and design thinking principles described above will allow teams to increase knowledge, performance, and innovation skills.

Teams that promote on the job learning, commitment to relentless improvement, and creating cultures of experimentation build innovators over innovations. Agile, customer-focused organizations combine the efficiencies of scale with the speed, flexibility, and resilience to compete and win in today’s world.

How teams take ownership:

· Explore ways of working that promote continuous improvement

· Create capacity for on-the-job learning

· Reward curiosity, exploration, and experimentation

· Try and then learn from failures

5) Have fun and celebrate success

The great thing about agile and design thinking principles is that they have natural breaks that provide opportunities to celebrate achievements and learn from activities that don’t go as hoped.

Celebrating success and showing appreciation for the team is heightened for virtual or hybrid teams.

Water cooler conversations and lunch with coworkers are a challenge with remote workers. Leaders must intentionally inject fun by having virtual team drinks, sponsoring wellness challenges, or incorporating games such as team trivia that build bridges and connections between members.

Other ways to make work more engaging are to host demo days, Dragon Den events, F’up activities and hack-a-thons to promote a sense of camaraderie while surfacing new ideas, better products and service experiences to customers.

Tips for making work more engaging and fun:

· Track team feedback (qualitative and quantitative)

· Make space for individuals

· Show appreciation of support from others

· Brainstorm how to make work more meaningful

· Keep it simple but be consistent

We help leaders align their teams with vision and strategy and use virtual or physical huddle boards to track goals and objectives. NimblTeams leverages agile and design thinking principles, user personas and journey maps to improve customer experiences.

NimblTeams identify and take ownership over issues and challenges. Collaboration is enhanced through coaching and creating safer, more inclusive environments that encourage employee voice and harness the energy of your people.

Please contact us if you are interested in learning more.