Theme 3 - Teams

How can we keep meetings relevant and interesting?

Team members often have to spend many hours attending meetings, which should provide an essential communication and planning function, but unfortunately they can become a boring routine that achieves little. By keeping meetings relevant, functional, and interesting you will be able to keep members interested in attending, and improve the ability of your group to plan and act.

Key strategies for relevant meetings are:

• Structure meetings and agendas so that you can deal with the important issues
• Good chairing to keep people on the topic
• Ensure some meetings evaluate goals and activities

Key Strategies that make effective use of time and meetings include:

• Limiting the number of meetings necessary by utilising technology, such as faxes and email lists, to communicate between meetings.
• Operating smaller functional working groups to deal with certain issues or activities. These groups can report to the larger group.

Key strategies for interesting meetings are:

• Consent agendas to deal quickly with routine matters
• Annual agendas that ensure matters are well covered at least once per year, but not every meeting
• Including self-development opportunities into the time
• Having some fun

Key strategies for functional meetings include:

• Starting and finishing on time
• Be clear about meeting roles
• Providing a warm and comfortable environment
• Providing or allow food if over meal times
• Developing standard strategies for reaching agreement
• Disseminating information and minutes regularly

Consent Agendas

Consent agendas are becoming popular in the United States as a way to limit the routine aspects of an agenda. They remain part of a normal agenda and work by listing all straightforward business under the heading consent agenda. Steps to take are:

• List all routine and uncontroversial business under the heading ‘consent agenda’
• Give each item a number in the consent agenda
• At the beginning of the meeting ask if any item needs to be moved from the consent agenda to agenda item other business
• Move anything that someone wishes to debate
• Someone moves that the group pass the consent agenda
• Another seconds the motion
• Move onto the other business

Annual Agenda

An annual agenda is a strategic method for dealing with the regularly occurring business of a group. Each year team roles should be reviewed, budgets passed, activities evaluated and strategic plans adapted. Each item is allocated to a meeting during the year where it is the focus, allowing an in-depth look at each issue. See Berit Lakey’s paper for further discussion on the benefits of consent and annual agendas, at the Nonprofit Governance and Management Centre website.