3 Ways to Make Your Staff Meetings More Engaging

After spending 20 years in public education, I figure I have attended roughly 500 weekly staff meetings. I have seen education leaders who could keep a library full of tired and hungry high school teachers engaged for over an hour and those who lost a cafetorium of elementary staff before the agendas were even passed out. Staff meetings get a bad rap for being too long and too boring, which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I attended my first State of the Company (SOC) meeting at Education Advanced.  

Each Monday afternoon, our entire company tunes into a Zoom call to get timely updates about the company as a whole and the departments within it. One by one, our team members pop into the call, “Brady Bunch” style, waving, exchanging pleasantries, and sharing a few jokes. Even with close to 100 squares on our call, we feel like a close-knit family.

The three recurring segments below keep our SOC meetings engaging and foster a culture of wellness and interconnectedness. (Keeping the meeting to 30 minutes also helps – shout-out to our operations team!) These segments are sure to engage your staff and help you avoid boring them in your recurring meetings.

1. Healthy Choices

This 5-minute segment is led by our Founder and CEO, Dr. Eli Crow, each week. Eli shares articles and information about relationship building, emotional intelligence, mental health, and even financial literacy. These weekly reminders keep the entire organization focused on taking care of ourselves and each other so we can continue providing superior service to our clients.  

What healthy choice messages do your teachers and staff need to hear at this time of year so they can continue providing superior service to your students?

Here are some of Eli’s recent shares:

• 11 Tips on Building Better Relationships Remotely
• The Benefits of Vitamin D
• Emotionally Intelligent People Embrace the 5-Minute Rule

The secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well. – John D. Rockefeller

2. Staff Shout-Outs

Our CTO, Tim Crouch, says he loves the Education Advanced team because we’re always blaming someone else for our successes. Each Monday, the entire company gets an email with a call for shout-outs. Anyone in any department can submit a shout-out to anyone else in the company. I – love – this – segment! Nothing feels better than being recognized for the hard work you do, or for going the extra mile to help a colleague in need.

What praise can your staff members offer each other to boost morale, especially when they often feel like theirs is a thankless job?

Here are some examples of shout-outs in our company:

• Shout out to Susan and Corinne for diving headfirst into our marketing and business development strategy.
• Shout out to the entire Cardonex support team. I’ve been on the job for two weeks and they have been so supportive and patient with me as I go through the new employee onboarding process.
• Shout out to Megan for her months of work on securing an insurance platform that will give us all additional choice and support.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. – Henry Ford

3. Colleague Convos

Joining a fully remote company can present challenges when it comes to meeting your new colleagues and building relationships. The colleague convos segment offers a fun, playful way to overcome that obstacle. Each week, several of our newcomers introduce themselves using a template provided by the operations team – intros are kept to 2-3 minutes, so our meetings remain brief. This segment helps our team find commonalities, build connections and retain our family feel.

Have you properly introduced your new team members and given your staff opportunities to get to know them better?

These prompts are provided by our operations team to new hires to guide their introductions (they can only choose 4!):

• My favorite personal information to share is...
• I would like to be known for...
• The challenges I like to solve are...
• If I were to step back in a time machine and travel back to my childhood, I would see that I was really great at...
• According to others, I am really good at...
• I am really passionate about...
• The person I most admire is...
• Three burning questions I have for my new colleagues at Education Advanced are...

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team. – Reid Hoffman  

BONUS Tip!

Try moving your housekeeping items, updates and announcements to the end of your staff meeting, after the more meaningful (and often more enjoyable!) segments. As Corinne Bishop, EAI Director of Strategy and Business Development suggests, “Save the nuts and bolts for the end and spend the majority of time on the culture building segments.”

Staff meetings are a necessary component of a healthy and cohesive organization. Although most people don’t associate staff meetings with enjoyment or fulfillment, they need not be a dreaded “have-to” experience. Consider using these three segments as a starting point to make your staff meetings more engaging. No matter the method you choose, well-run and thoughtful staff meetings can lead to improvements in organizational performance and a thriving organizational culture.