Weekly: everything you need to know to organize the ideal weekly meeting

How to prepare and run effective weekly meetings

How to make it easy to work as a team remotely? How to organize and run an effective and productive team meeting? What is the most appropriate meeting cadence and type for your team? What key rituals should be set up to maintain team cohesion when its members are working remotely? 

In this article, we will answer all these questions, which have become more pressing than ever given the shift toward remote working and multi-site, multi-team, and multi-project working methods. The good news is, there are easy-to-implement solutions for effective teamwork, both in the office and remotely!

Why hold a weekly team meeting?

The team meeting is the key to effective team management, even remotely. As a project manager, supervisor or leader, it’s vital to find the right formula to bring team members together and stay connected, especially with the people who are working remotely, and make sure everything is in place to move projects forward. 

Running a meeting is not that simple. Often, "traditional" weekly meetings are introduced with slides presented by the manager, and there's a round table discussion so that everyone can bring up different topics. Sometimes, the agenda is not set in advance, and time is spent going back over certain points, asking team members to explain the topic, having things repeated so everything is noted correctly etc. 

To top it off, if members are working remotely, it’s not easy to connect to video conferencing and work tools, which prevents the meeting from starting smoothly and effectively. However, regular team meetings are essential to strengthen cohesion, let everyone express themselves and be aligned with shared goals.

How do you organize a weekly meeting with team members working remotely?

More and more teams are working remotely, and they need to find solutions to keep discussions flowing seamlessly. According to a study by Klaxoon and Propeller Insights conducted on meetings in the United States, 82% of American workers say team thinking stimulates creativity, but 63% of employees who work remotely say they feel less informed than their colleagues in the office. 

In a world where teams are distributed and remote working is becoming more widespread, it’s time to respond to these major challenges that plague teamwork. The goal is to let everyone interact seamlessly, even remotely, in short, to get in sync. 

That’s why Board, Klaxoon’s visual whiteboard, includes a library of ready-to-use meeting templates that can be used to launch a meeting with all the team members in one click, whether they’re on site or at distance. These templates are full of easy tips for effective meetings. With Board, everything you need to prepare for a weekly team meeting is centralized in one place, and managed with one tool. You can work as a team just as if you were physically gathered in one place!

Board, the ideal tool to prepare, run and conclude a team meeting

In practice, how does it work? With the Weekly template, start a meeting in one click, invite the participants and launch Live, the built-in videoconferencing tool on Board. Participants can join from any digital device (smartphone, tablet, computer etc.). 

And that’s it, you're all set! Make a weekly update together, share what worked well, highlight individual and collective successes. Every week, the team meets on their Weekly Board at a pre-agreed time that suits everyone, and the meeting takes place both in person and remotely. No more workplace constraints, organizing a business meeting is simple with Board!

How to set up a weekly meeting with Microsoft Teams and Klaxoon

If your work environment uses Microsoft Teams, using the Weekly template is very simple. Just launch the template, and share it on your team’s channel. Christophe Trapani, National Home Support Manager at CNAF, runs weekly meetings with his employees with 100% team engagement! Using Teams, Christophe shares a Weekly Board on his "Weekly catch up" channel. Everyone posts their ideas beforehand to boost efficiency and share more information during the meeting. By activating the Synchro Board during the meeting, every team member enjoys the same experience, no matter where they are. 

What’s interesting about these tools and what I like about the Weekly meeting is being able to get some perspective. Klaxoon lets me take the team’s pulse about a decision, and on the back of that, make the best choice.

Now you know all about the right tools to hold effective meetings. All you have to do is apply the simple rules to organize, prepare and run your weekly team meetings.

Get prepared before the weekly team meeting

According to a study carried out by OpinionWay in April 2017 with a panel of 1,012 employees, only half of them think that their meetings are productive, and 18% of employees dislike the fact that there is no specific purpose for these meetings. 

This new generation weekly meeting is collaborative, and lets team creativity run wild. Klaxoon has been working in this field since it was founded, and designed Board with this in mind. This limitless whiteboard is accessible to all the team members to share text, drawings, images, videos, web links and documents. Everyone can express their ideas before, during and after the meeting in any format. However, to save time and let everyone structure their thoughts before expressing themselves, it’s essential that all the participants take the time to prepare the meeting in advance. 

3 minutes is enough: every day of the week or just before the start of the weekly meeting, at their own pace, everyone adds to their space:

• Highlights of their week
• Completed actions
• Outstanding actions

During the meeting, the team members briefly explain their ideas displayed on the screen. Everyone has their say, and the time for saying things however they want during this round table. This is useful information for everyone that is now shared on one digital collaborative workspace, Board.

Take stock of project progress

The weekly meeting is a get-together specifically for the team. The meeting goals and agenda are straightforward: effectively share the week's key points! Taking stock of the past week means the team is prepared for the week to come. This might involve discussing the progress of an ongoing project, sharing what worked well and some feedback, but also the frustrations, doubts and obstacles. You don't stay stuck and you can make decisions quickly, as a team. 

Of course, the idea is not to share absolutely everything you’ve done during the week and transform the team meeting into a project catch-up. However, you can share what you think is useful for the team to move forward together in the same direction. This weekly meeting can also be used to identify the points to be tackled in depth, and schedule future meetings specifically for this purpose.

Share information

This team get-together is also an opportunity for everyone to talk about what they liked that week, or share some key figures to do with their job. More general information can also be shared during the weekly meeting, for example to do with human resources or company news.

The ideal meeting length is 30 minutes

That’s what meeting effectiveness surveys tell us. The survey of 630 executives conducted by Cadreo in 2017 showed that meetings should ideally last between 30 and 60 minutes (for half of the respondents), or even less than 30 minutes (for 30%). With the Weekly template, it’s possible. In 30 minutes or less, the entire team is in sync and everyone is on the same page about the important information to be retained, even people working remotely! The time spent in meetings is efficient and constructive, you make decisions and everyone participates. But other benefits are also worth noting.

Reduce preparation and conclusion time

While weekly meetings should be quick and effective, conclusion and preparation time should also be kept to a minimum for the meeting facilitator. With Board:

• No more note-taking by the meeting facilitator, the meeting minutes are right there at the end of the meeting and can be accessed by everyone, at any time.
• The next meeting will be held on the same Board the following week, to keep all the information in one place.
• If someone misses a meeting, they can easily see how the team’s been doing, because the information from the past week remains accessible on the virtual whiteboard.

With Klaxoon, spend less time preparing and facilitating meetings, and spend more time on your team projects!

Keep exchanging information easily

The Weekly template is a ready-to-use meeting template to get you started on Klaxoon, and it makes facilitating your meetings a breeze. No more preparing the agenda at the last minute, and round tables with no one daring to speak. Expression, dynamism, creativity and inclusion are the order of the day. 

Questions can arise orally during the meeting and answers can be written in ideas. If you have any more questions once the meeting is over, you can simply use Klaxoon’s Questions tool. In one click, you can ask the person or people concerned, and they can answer asynchronously. 

The discussion thread is always available on the Board, which means you can look back at the history of a topic. Everything is centralized on the team's Board. It's easy to find information, and you avoid endless emails!

With the online Weekly template, run an effective, productive and interactive meeting every week, to see exactly what direction the group is taking!