How to Host a Successful Recurring Meeting
Having worked remotely for a majority of my professional career leading virtual teams and remote programs, I’ve participated in and led countless online meetings and group events. I’m sure most of us have to some extent at this point. The number of people working from home has increased since the start of the pandemic, so more of us are experiencing remote team interactions than ever before. According to Zippia, 66% of US employees work remotely either full or part-time as of 2022, and 16% of companies are fully remote.
Working on remote teams requires balancing when meetings are needed versus when you need personal space to get work done. And when deciding how meetings can be most effective, it’s important to understand the value of one-off meetings versus recurring, consistent meetings.
When you’ve decided that a recurring meeting can be most effective, here are some best practices to help you set up your recurring meetings for success. Follow these five simple steps to coordinate and host successful recurring meetings.
1. Set a clear goal and intention for the meeting
Begin by clarifying the purpose for your meeting and the need for it to be recurring. Define the intention behind the meeting, why it needs to occur regularly, and who needs to participate.
A recurring meeting can be effective for agile work approaches to projects, keeping many people looped into a project, allowing everyone who works on a project or with a customer to touch base, for departmental or team meetings, and more.
The cadence of your meeting schedule should also align with the purpose. Traditional cadences — weekly, monthly, quarterly or somewhere in between — can be an ideal starting point. Look to your sales cycle, project timelines, or other business-specific metric to help set the timing of meetings. You can always set an initial cadence and then modify it as you go based on business needs.
2. Invite the correct people in advance
When you are starting a company or building out a team, you need to decide which seats on the bus to fill. The same goes for successful meetings. Decide who are the people that need to be part of the conversation that will not only add the right impact to the meeting, but will also find value in attending. Make sure you notify these individuals in advance and get buy-in. Proactively send out meeting invitations with enough lead time to make sure it is on everyone’s radar and blocked.
For individuals that need to be aware of what’s going, there are ways to keep them in the loop without filling time on their calendar. Figure out a plan for who these “watchers” are and how to communicate with them, whether that means sending an after-meeting summary, making full meeting notes available, or sending out a recording of the meeting. You can also mark them as an optional attendee on the meeting invitation, making them aware of what’s going on and allowing them to assign their own priority for attending.
3. Create an agenda and make it accessible
For successful meetings, take time to prepare in advance by determining the meeting agenda and then sharing it with all participants. Be thoughtful about how you will use the time to achieve the goal of the meeting (step one).
I personally find that for meetings involving people from different teams and departments, a simple Google Doc works well to incorporate all ideas in an interactive way. I include an overarching agenda of topics to discuss and prompts for meeting members to add their own updates or ideas.
You can also invite the other meeting members to add to the agenda in advance or lead portions of the meeting. Just make sure everyone knows the expectations in advance — one to two full business days at a minimum — so they have time to prepare.
4. Set the tone for engagement
As the host, you will facilitate the meeting discussion. In addition to the traditional facilitator roles — moderating time, moving the discussion along, making sure notes are recorded — how you encourage discussion comes down to intentionally designing and planning for collaboration and engagement. The host sets the tone for how meeting participants will be involved. Use your meeting purpose as the North Star to help align what will make for appropriate communication.
Depending on the purpose, just as you can have interactive and collaborative agendas, you can also have interactive meeting content and decks. For my team meetings, I’ve switched to building slide decks in Google Jamboard, which allows for everyone to actively participate and add ideas and questions during and after the meeting. This can also be used as a built-in tool for brainstorming during meetings!
5. Clarify the takeaways and next steps
At the end of each meeting, it’s important to recap and set the stage for what’s next. Realign the group around what was discussed and needs to happen before the next meeting. Assign individuals specific tasks to help hold each other accountable. And make sure everyone knows when the next meeting is taking place.
This step is critical to maintaining the momentum of recurring meetings. It ensures that progress is continuous so your recurring meetings stay effective.
Please share your meeting tips in the comments!
