Last month, I met with the Executive Director of a prospective client who was frustrated about how their staff meetings were going. "Our staff meetings aren't working," she confided. "Two people always show up late, one person always takes over and interrupts, and we rarely get through our agenda. I'm starting to wonder if we should just cancel them."
I hear this a lot in my consulting work. Staff meetings are often synonymous with wasted time; they're calendar blocks that pull us away from "real work." But I've also experienced transformative, well-run meetings that build team culture, solve problems, and keep everyone moving in a shared direction. They're not just about updates, complaints, and to-do's.
I recently worked with an organization in North Jersey that completely turned around their staff meetings. When I first started with them, their senior team of five (ranging from six months to 10+ years of tenure) was struggling with inconsistent meetings, no clear agenda, and what was described as "an energy drain for everyone."
Through some focused reflections and planning, we identified how to redesign their staff meetings so they “work” as intended. Here’s what made the difference:
Start with the fundamentals: At the start of planning, the meeting organizer(s) should ask key questions on the purpose and attendance, and have clear answers:
Who needs to be in the room?
What are you trying to achieve?
When and how often should the team meet?
One practical change we made was designating specific roles; in this case, having their Executive Director lead meeting prep (including sending a request for agenda items the prior week, and then sharing the agenda two days beforehand), while the Exec and Operations Directors co-facilitated topics at the meeting. The Education Director became the dedicated note-taker, ensuring someone was always capturing the key decisions, meeting outcomes, and next steps, including who was responsible for what actions.
Create a structure and schedule that serves you: The best meeting structure isn't always the most obvious one. For this team, we found that Tuesdays at 1pm worked better than Monday mornings. We set a clear "working agenda" that included space for program evaluation, sharing important updates, and planning upcoming events. We also kept it flexible enough to adapt when urgent items were raised, and designated Thursday afternoons as a back-up time for rescheduling when needed.
Understand your role as a facilitator: Good facilitation isn't about controlling every minute; it's about clearly explaining the agenda item and guiding the conversation, but also reading the room and knowing when to shift gears. Sometimes you need to stand up and change the energy. Other times, you need to create space for quieter voices. The Executive Director got skilled at this, using everything from humor to lighten the mood when needed, to bringing brief and interesting articles to kickoff the meetings and keep people engaged.
Make follow-up non-negotiable: The real test of a meeting isn't what happens during it, it's what happens after. We established a simple rule: meeting notes had to be shared within 24 hours in a designated Google folder, with clear action items, responsible parties, and deadlines. When someone missed a meeting, they knew exactly what they were responsible for, and who to check-in with to get caught up.
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