If your team doesn’t know something about the organization that they should we need to take responsibility as we are the one’s who are meant to communicate to them about what you’ve heard, Seen, Read, know, Think, Believe or surmise about what’s going on upstream.
The most effective way to hold a staff meeting's is weekly. This is a time to catch up and discuss the past week and the weeks coming. If you don’t do them weekly you’re probably indulging a personal bias in tasks over people. Directive number one in the Effective Leadership Triangle is “Stop putting personal preferences ahead of organizational effectiveness”.
Have an agenda to everyone in advance. An agenda must have a start time for each topic and the start times should be followed. Use a parking lot for items that need to be re addressed. Set ground rules in the first meeting and continue to refer to them through out the course of the meetings. Let you staff create and manage the ground rules.
The staff meeting is for everyone to attend, no exception. If a person reports to you they are to attend the staff meeting.
Start the meeting with a welcome and go through the agenda which everyone should have. Touch on the ground rules again if necessary.
Allow 15 minutes for a “waterfall” of information that has come from up stream and need to be passed onto your directs. You are not communicated to; you are communicated through. Include in the waterfall of topics “This is what it means for us”
Schedule 15 minutes for special topics/reports/updates. This is a chance for you to delegate and coach one of your directs to deliver information on a special project they are working on, or to pass on new information to the team they have discovered that has helped them to be more effective. This time could be used for a brain storming session on a new project.
Each direct gets 10 minutes to brief the team on their achievements and progress to goals and company objectives. Encourage each person to present using a flip chart and highlight numbers for which they are accountable. Use the traffic light signal for progress. Green light/Pen around a number means they are on track. Orange needs focus. Red is at a stop and full resources are needed to get back to orange and then green. Each team member will hold each other accountable.
Intermittently ask for feedback from staff on the meeting. What's working well and what needs to be looked at for improvement.