With a morning team meeting, stay in contact and stay organized

To work together on a project, exchange ideas and information, and progress together, team members must update each other regularly and above all productively. This is a problem that Tamsir Fayer, Director of Innovation at Heppner, a large logistics and transport solutions company, had to face every day. Every morning, he struggled holding meetings with his team of 13 workers – all working remotely – trying to get all to meet their targets. Fortunately two years ago, he discovered the Klaxoon online whiteboard and GoodMorning Meeting Template which, says he, is a perfect match for his needs. Discover how Tamsir Fayer and his team use GoodMorning Meeting template to save time and be more efficient.

When to use Klaxoon and GoodMorning Meeting for your daily team meeting?

As Director of Innovation, Tamsir was already an expert at leading meetings and making them productive events. But Covid and a huge increase in the number of his team members working remotely upended a lot of good habits in the team. Here are a few examples of problems that cropped up:

• Drop in productivity. Some team members found it hard to keep up productivity with remote work. Tamsir found he had to give more support and more regularly check up on them.
• Long-winded remote meetings, with poor allocation of speaking turns, some participants providing too much detail, others not enough. Result? Meetings that got too long and pretty boring.
• Loss of the big picture. To keep the big picture foremost, an independent project follow-up tool must be used. But such tools are often user-unfriendly and made his team members lose motivation.
• The team at times poorly understood tasks, which really was counterproductive when meetings were supposed to provide complete but quick information to members.
  
• Information was poorly exchanged and memorized, leading to misunderstandings and delays.
• And there crept in a feeling of loneliness, lack of belonging, a drop in team spirit. Managers know just how unproductive that can be!

“We realized we were losing a lot of time. We weren’t sharp enough. When I discovered the latest Klaxoon templates, I wanted to try them out. They seemed like a good match for our needs.”  Tamsir Fayer, innovation director of a transport and logistics group

Videoconference meetings on Microsoft Teams alone were unable to meet the Innovation team at Heppner’s growing needs. They needed increased visual support to better structure the Daily Stands-up, and greater buy-in opportunities by all members of the team. They needed a way to make the best of each meeting.

For Tamsir, that’s exactly what Klaxoon’s GoodMorning Meeting template did, a real difference compared with their former meetings.

How can GoodMorning Meeting help my team optimize our daily sync meetings?

Klaxoon’s GoodMorning Meeting incorporates simple concepts designed to meet the needs of teams working either remotely or in the office, no matter how big or small the teams, and no matter what business they do.

A quick and easy meeting model to sync your team every morning

GoodMorning Meeting involves a quick and easy model based on Board, Klaxoon’s flagship tool. It’s basically an online endless whiteboard on which team members jot down their ideas, post text messages and share images, organizing them in a vivid and visual way. Tamsir and his team, for example, use it to report back on missions past and present, job status, problems and to share tips and remarks.

Each day, whenever they feel like it, members can post information to the Board that they wish to discuss with members at the next meeting.

The main aim of GoodMorning Meeting is clarity of information. From that flows efficiency. To achieve clarity, the template uses a very clear table separated into weeks, color codes and colored post-its (you can add your own colors if you like!).

• Green remove post-its for completed tasks
• Blue post-its for ongoing tasks
• Yellow post-its for things to do in the course of the day
• Red post-its for problems

The template can be adjusted to specific needs. For example, Tamsir grouped working weeks into sprints. But that’s not all!

One of main advantages of GoodMorning Meeting is that it offers a new way to better organize meetings, in particular with sync morning meetings. Which is essential for teams that work remotely.

Thus, every morning at the same time, after they’ve updated the Board with their info, team members sync for 15 to 30 minutes, stopwatch in hand. The template is designed to help participants stop losing time through meetings that overshoot each time.

One participant would kick off the meeting live, while another drag on the Board, allowing everybody to focus on the right spot. Then, one by one, each member gets a chance to report back on the previous day’s activities, what he/she needs to do that day, their problems, and so forth.

A template you can adjust to your team needs

Tamsir considerably cut the length of morning meetings with GoodMorning Meeting, and further increased efficiency by finetuning it to the specific needs and workplace culture of his team.

In addition to the basic color code, he decided to add orange to allow team members to highlight additional projects they might wish to draw attention to. This adjustment of GoodMorning Meeting now also allows Tamsir to foresee when a member might be absent, or overworked. Which helps him improve workload allocation in the team. And enables members to more easily identify others who might struggle and need their assistance!

Ever mindful of team needs, Tamsir decided to make the template even more user-friendly and fun in order to better keep up the bond between members and foster team spirit. To the same intent, GoodMorning Meeting allows team members to personalize the Board, for example by allowing them to choose avatars that reflect their mood, the day, their tastes, likes, etc.

To create our Board, I started out with the basic GoodMorning Meeting template, but kept changing and adjusting it to the needs of the team. Tamsir Fayer, innovation director of a transport and logistics group

Tamsir added to his Board an area where birthdays can be noted in pink, and another dedicated to team vacation pictures. The meetings he chairs are now not only more productive, but also greater fun.

An online whiteboard which helps to improve collaborative project management

Tamsir’s team often does two-week sprints. So he adjusted the sprints to GoodMorning Meeting by opting for a project mode layout.

This involved giving each team member a line on the Board, a personalized space where they may escalate useful information or share issues of concern.

There is a column that displays the days of the month in weekly format. Tamsir can thus at a glance see who does what, when, and how fast, to early on identify issues to address at upcoming meetings.

By keeping the same Board for all his morning sync meetings, and by grouping his tables into two-weekly sprints, Tamsir developed a tool that not only helps him better plan but also better manage projects by keeping the big picture front and foremost all the time.

But how to keep the morning meetings routine fresh and creative all the time?

Tamsir came up with a perfect plan. Each morning, at 9:15, his team meets on Microsoft Teams for a meeting of 30 minutes that he chairs, but where the order in which team members report back changes each day. One day it will be by alphabetical order, the next by age, the next randomized. This helps Tamsir keep members attentive and alert.

What are the benefits of using GoodMorning Meeting for your daily get-togethers?

Quick and efficient daily updates, in only 15 minutes

Tamsir’s team had a real need for sharp and short meetings, valuable and useful information, and significant savings of time. Thanks to GoodMorning Meeting, this is exactly what Tamsir helped his team achieve.

According to Tamsir, such improvements help the whole team to perform better. Those who spoke too much now speak less, and those who spoke too little now contribute more. The template also favors visual management, which helps all to be clear and concise. Everybody now focuses on information and being efficient.

Visual displays for better project follow-up

Visual displays allow the daily meeting to focus on key points and problem solving. Which enables Tamsir to better deal with risk. And the team to help slower members. That way the whole group now progresses at the same speed.

With the personalized layout Tamsir built up, his online whiteboard gives him a better view both of the big picture and each team member, thus improving his overall project management. For example, he now anticipates delays better in cases where team members have parallel projects at any given moment. GoodMorning Meeting thus makes for greater flexibility, something only achieved thanks to its visual aids.

Last but not least, Tamsir really appreciates the fact that his whole team can through the Board send information to all other members whenever they wish. It improves internal team communication when all have information on the projects and tasks of each other. Today Tamsir sees much greater cooperation between team members than before they used the Board.

In conclusion, Tamsir and his team note the following benefits in their morning sync meetings since they started using GoodMorning Meeting:

• The table system, color codes, shortened and better control of the meeting encourage participants to remain clear and concise and stick to key points.
• Each participant is offered an opportunity to ask advice and help with their tasks for the day, or with problems that hindered their progress the day before. The board thus serves as project management tool by helping solve problems encountered by each team member.
• GoodMorning Meeting also reduces the loneliness brought on by social distancing, provides improved opportunities for members to help one another, and betters the flow of information between them. Teamwork thus becomes natural and productive again. Indeed, what can be more productive than partners all striving that each gets faster and more efficient at meeting his/her responsibilities?
• Daily syncs of 15 minutes more productive than 2-hour meetings? Sure! Thanks to huge savings of time, far more efficient morning meetings, and a team that achieves its objectives much faster.

Whatever your project, and whatever the size of your team, you’ll find it’s easy to adjust GoodMorning Meeting’s board to the specific needs of your team and your morning get-togethers!