How to transform your weekly meeting into an effective team ritual

The challenge: moving away from top-down meetings and generating more engagement through collective thinking

At Crédit Agricole Côtes d’Armor, teams face a recurring problem. Despite three hours of weekly meetings, there are still too many unresolved issues at the end of the day. Run as they were prior to their initiative, the meetings were way too long, too top-down and did not allow for everyday problems resolutions. Mathieu Guenroc, Sales manager at the bank, decided this was no longer the optimal way to work, and searched for a solution. He begins with a list of the various concerns that the teams are facing.

• The role of the manager must be revised to leave behind this mindset of a “Superhero Manager” who must manage everything according to the management pyramid principle
• A large part of the participants are not involved in the meeting, even though they all have things to share and points of view to express.
• Meetings are not productive, when they end with no decisions made, and problems unsolved.
• Beyond the meetings, teams don’t have a proper shared space where discussions could be visual, hence easier to access and focused on information circulation.

We wanted to get away from the traditional meeting with a U-shaped table and flip chart. We wanted an action-reaction meeting, one that is lively, with feedback.

Looking for a solution to his challenge, Mathieu turned to Klaxoon Board to create a visual and collaborative workspace that could be used for all of his meetings.

The solution: a new daily ritual to solve day-to-day problems

With Board, Mathieu offers the team a proper meeting space that speeds up communication and problem solving on a daily basis

Indeed, accessible from any device, Board is a single entry point that allows everyone to access all the information they need: planning, agency KPIs, etc.

On this Board, several areas are easily identifiable visually.

The TEAM space: the heart of the reactor

Here the aim is to keep in sync every day as a team. In this board, all team members have their own space. Each participant can share useful information about their on-going topics and current projects with the group. To make it easier for everyone to understand, a color code is used: 

• Green for done,
• Blue for in progress,
• Yellow for to do,
• And red for things that have hit a sticking point.

With just a glance, all the information is available and factual, and it becomes much easier to identify and deal with problems thanks to the red color identification. Since the whiteboard is infinite, it is possible to run this board over several weeks or even months to keep an overview of even the largest projects. With this board, each team member is perfectly aware of the tasks assigned to them and the progress made by their team members on the project.

This is the section that the whole team focuses on the most, whether during the morning sync meetings or throughout the day, in order to indicate progress on the project, share ideas, add special requests or even sticking points thanks to a system of post-it notes and color coding.

With this shared space, all team members can contribute and share their point of view, which reduces frustration and misunderstandings. Using the board, each person can participate and help make the meeting much livelier and more effective. And all of that, in just 15 minutes a day.

Additional assets to enrich the Board and customize it

• A “Framework” section, which constantly reminds the team of the values that everyone is committed to respecting. It is also an opportunity to give a warm welcome to newcomers who are invited to participate for their first morning meeting, and sign this charter. Mathieu starts with a simple frame and then turns it into a team commitment, in line with the Future of Work and horizontal management!
• A “Sharing” section, which is used to circulate useful information to the team. Available anytime and anywhere, this section allows everyone to access information even when working asynchronously.
•  A “Reception Schedule” section, which is specific to the needs of Mathieu and his team, since the names of the people who will be receiving clients at the agency are listed here. This is proof that the Klaxoon Board can fit everyone’s needs and serve as a centralized information platform for the whole team!
• What’s more? Various sections related to customer satisfaction, a list of team members’ birthdays, a vacation schedule, etc.

Mathieu has really created a space for the whole life of the team, designed as much for workplace efficiency as for the well-being of his team. Thanks to the very visual display of all information, his morning sync meetings are more effective than ever, run in just 15-20 minutes. If needed, the team can interact asynchronously via other Klaxoon tools like Question, Memo, or Network. It’s the end of lost information, buried in emails. Everything is centralized. It's easy to send direct requests to each other, as Mathieu and the Crédit Agricole Côtes d'Armor teams do with Question. It's also an opportunity to exchange ideas outside of meeting times and make the most out of collective intelligence during sync meetings. It also allows other teams to take the information or share it simply by joining the board.

Using the Klaxoon Board on a daily basis allows all stakeholders to remain in sync, as Mathieu explains.

Information is presented in a more concrete and visible way; we know what’s going on in the team and our exchanges are more factual.

The result: more participation, more engagement, and more effectiveness on a daily basis

This new meeting format has resulted in increased responsiveness and productivity through a more dynamic and participatory format.

We went from 10% participation to 90% engagement and are much more responsive in solving problems.

A manager conducts a symphony played by the team: perfectly in sync

Collaboration is at the forefront. It is the team members who truly host the meeting and make it come alive: it is by pushing participation further thanks to his clever use of the Klaxoon Board that Mathieu managed to give everyone the opportunity to be heard and to express themselves. This allows everyone to feel more involved.

No more traditional meetings: responsiveness is up tenfold

As Mathieu explains, meetings around U-shaped tables are a thing of the past. Meetings are held where they are needed, and when they are needed. Some on site, others remotely, sometimes standing up in meeting rooms or in more convivial spaces. When they leave the meeting room, Crédit Agricole Côte d'Armor teams can develop their creativity and express themselves as they see fit. The power of visual management also makes it possible to bring information to life, well beyond the mere meeting time. During the meeting, the speakers have no trouble making themselves understood thanks to the visual support provided by the whiteboard.

No more endless email chains: all useful information is available in one place

Outside of the meeting, this visual medium makes it possible to greatly reduce the number of emails: before, these were the go-to solution for his team members when they wanted to share information. Their inboxes were clogged! Now, they just need to take a look at the board to get all the relevant information. It's a very effective way to bring up sticking points and deal with them even more quickly than before.

Klaxoon offers much more than just whiteboard features. We optimize the time of our daily meetings by speeding up our exchanges.

As one more proof of the effectiveness of this new approach, the use of Klaxoon has spread throughout the Crédit Agricole Côtes d'Armor network. Now, more than 35 regional banks and nearly 40,000 people use the platform on a daily basis. And all this within one of the largest European banking institutions.

If you want to develop your daily team ritual too, you can use Klaxoon’s ready-to-use templates.

With the GoodMorning Meeting, for example: the meeting to get in sync as a team on a daily basis. With this template, you can easily do a quick 15-minute update to share useful information with everyone, like Mathieu Guenroc and the Crédit Agricole Côtes d'Armor teams.

And if you need a weekly meeting, you can try the Weekly template.