456: Running an Efficient Team Meeting
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Do you run team meetings? Meetings are usually one of the last things we want to do, and may even feel overwhelmed by putting one together. We walk through points to consider when planning the frequency and length of meetings. Plus, we share our 15-minute meeting format and how to prepare well!
Main topics
Why hold team meetings
Things to consider
How to prepare
Our 15-minute meeting
Main takeaway: An effective meeting boils down to the preparation you bring each time and respecting everyone who attends.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
meeting, talk, people, client, team, working, pet sitters, topic, employees, staff, question, remember, confessional, sitter, pet, happen, associates, action items, discussion, care
SPEAKERS
Collin Funkhouser, Meghan
Meghan 00:00
Oh, hi there. Welcome to pet sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you to our sponsor today, pet sitters associates and our stupendous Patreon members for helping to support today's show and keep it going. If
Collin Funkhouser 00:15
you'd like to learn more about what it means to support the show, you can go to pet search professional.com/support. We've
Meghan 00:20
talked on the podcast a lot about hiring and our hiring practices and interviewed others who hire and have teams but we never actually talked about team meetings. And there was a question recently in our sitter confessionals Facebook group about team meetings and how to structure them and what to do and what to talk about during the meeting. So we wanted to dive into that today, they're
Collin Funkhouser 00:41
actually really important to having a cohesive group of employees that are working for you and a lot of other reasons as well, especially wherever you're holding these on a semi regular basis. So there's some consistency here. And
Meghan 00:52
that's usually the most common question that people have is how frequently do I have these meetings? Does it need to be this big in person or deal where we sit down for two hours and we flesh out things and we brainstorm ideas? The answer's no, it doesn't have to be I mean, we hold weekly team meetings for 1520 minutes each other over zoom. So we don't make our meetings a big deal, except when we do big get togethers, semi quarterly for a big holiday party or an ice cream, social or things like that. But as far as the inner workings of our company, we just do weekly team meetings. But that's something that you have to decide for yourself,
Collin Funkhouser 01:28
the frequency should match the meaning or the importance, or the reason behind why you're getting together, of if you are wanting to do more team building things, that's something that probably doesn't need to happen every week, unless you're struggling deeply with a lot of cohesion in your company, then you need to have some more FaceTime with people, if you're just planning or regurgitating some trading information or just touching base with people make sure we're all on the same page. Those are little light short meetings that happen on a higher frequency basis. So really, it's what this all boils down to is planning and purpose. Why do you want to have these team meetings? What what at the end when people just hit log out of zoom? Or they walk out of the room? Why? Or what should they have known? What is the purpose of them having shown up to that, and it's
Meghan 02:14
also going to depend on the size of your team, if you've just hired your first person, and you really want to connect with them and get to know them on a very personal level and and share with them the mission vision and values on a deep level with them, then probably in person meetings at your office or a coffee shop or something would be more beneficial. But when you grow to a size of 20 3040 employees, that's just not feasible really to have that on a weekly basis, not everybody's going to show up, people are going to be busy doing other things. And that's something else you're gonna have to think about. What are the requirements for this for your company? Is this an absolute requirement that everybody shows up? Well, that's easier to do when you have a smaller team. But as you grow, not everybody is going to be able to be there. Well,
Collin Funkhouser 02:54
and to back up a little bit on that point negative of Who are you meeting with? Are you meeting with a fuel Operations Manager? Are you meeting with your administrators? Or are you meeting with your field staff? The frequency, the content, the purpose of each meeting that you have should be different depending on who you are meeting with? And what the goal is for them at the end of it? Is it a one on one is that a meeting that you're having with just one person? Are you meeting with your Field Operations Manager and your operations manager and your administrator to really plan out long, big long term goals are you meeting with a business partner. And so this is where we have to think of it's not just a Hey, want to sit down and chat for a few minutes, it's, we are the ones who must go through the process of thinking deeply about this so that it is actually relevant. And it actually you know, good things come from this and not just wasted time with people blabbering on. And if you are using independent contractors, just remember that the rules and regulations about requiring them to attend or to watch or view your meetings is that you can't you can't require them to do that. You can make them optional, but it's not a requirement that you can place on them. Regardless of who you are meeting with though, these regular well structured meetings have three really key benefits. The first one, it's all about communication, and collaboration, because it fosters this openness among whoever you're meeting with. And between people who are attending, they get to know one another. There's a familiarity there, that it provides a platform to share and discuss challenges or brainstorm solutions to things that they're encountering. And this is especially important where our employees are working completely independently. Most of the time, this these meetings can help bridge communication gaps, which ensures that everybody's on the same page. And when I say that, what we what we're talking about is this. People understand why we're here and what we're doing and how to do it. Because
Meghan 04:52
in the corporate world, a lot of people and if you had a previous life in a career of the corporate world, you know this meetings are thought of as a drudgery of oh man, I have to attend this hour long thing, I don't want to be here, I don't want to do this, this is stupid, there's 15 minutes of an introduction of what we're going to talk about. And it's just, it's pointless. So the best case scenario is for you to anchor down your people into why these are important, share with them, go deep with them and make them as efficient as possible. They want to
Collin Funkhouser 05:22
talk about keeping people on mission, it's, well, first, they have to know the mission. And then they have to see themselves in the mission. And that starts with regularly talking about it. And the second aspect of why we should have regular meetings is about team building and morale. They help build a sense of unity and belonging among your staff, and even yourself, where you see people working together, we get these comments a lot where people go, man, it was so good to see so many faces out there, knowing or men do so and so brought up that that problem i I thought I was the only one who dealt with that they really offer an opportunity for employees to connect with one another. Again, especially whenever we're so isolated and remote from other people. It's also a great way to publicly recognize achievements, celebrate milestones, or addressing those concerns that employees are going to bring to you. So leaving some time and openness of Are there any other questions, comments, concerns, or criticisms that you may have about what we're going on right now. And that actually, while you may not like talking about bad things in front of everybody, it helps build cohesion, people look to you, and they'll look, they're probably they're solving problems, they are you overcoming this, they are building solutions they're working together. And that's all good things. Having
Meghan 06:35
regular meetings is also an effective way to track the progress of the business over time. So if you have a big project that you're working on, or revamping your SOPs, or your field manual, and you're wanting input from your team, or they're having their specific documents that they're working on, discussing that progress is going to help keep them on track. And you on track, we talked a few weeks ago about using a task management system for you know, a sauna or something like that. But the regular meetings will allow for like real time adjustments, maybe they need an extra day or two to work on this or strategizing if they're tripped up in this way. And you can help them overcome that. Or you all can brainstorm ideas on how to achieve the goal that you want. Or
Collin Funkhouser 07:16
just see how the business is doing and share that with other people. You know, at the end of the year, it's a great time to share how many visits were done, how many families were served, keeping people updated about how busy the upcoming weekend is over Christmas, or whatever that is, and going, look, hey, guys, we are up 20%, or we were down 20% over last year. But it's nothing to do with you. We appreciate your hard work and dedication, and
Meghan 07:38
then going to them and say hey, what do you think we can do to market better? Do you have connections? What what resources do we have within our team to really keep us going forward. And again, you don't have to do these meetings in person, we hold weekly team meetings over zoom, which are recorded and sent out to everyone. So again, as our team has grown, we've recognized that not everybody can be there at the time that we want. They're busy, they're not they're doing another job. They're doing visits for us. When we onboard somebody into our company, we say we have these meetings at this time every week, you are not required to be there. But it is required that you either show up or watch the recording because we feel that as a company, these are crucial to our success have seen everybody getting everybody's input. And if you're not able to make it, we understand but here is a recording of that meeting.
Collin Funkhouser 08:26
And if you're wondering how we keep track of that, you can do it in one of two ways. We upload these to loom. And you can either create a bespoke video for each staff member that you're sending it to so that you get an alert of when they watch it. Or you can add a link at the very end of the video that takes it to a Google sheet that says yes, here's my name. Here's the date. And here is when I watched this video. And yes, I agreed that I did all that and I completed it. However you want to track that there are ways to track that. So you don't just have to keep chasing people down to see Did you watch it? Did you watch it? Did you watch it? There's automated ways to do
Meghan 09:03
that. And I know it can seem kind of strict to either require somebody to show up or watch the video. But at the end of the day, we figure if we don't require them, then people just aren't going to they're going to stop showing up. They're going to stop watching it. And then it's just going to be Colin and I on the video talking to ourselves for no reason. And so we feel that this is very important. We try not to waste people's time as much as possible, and therefore we record them.
Collin Funkhouser 09:27
And we want these to be quick hits. We want them to be extremely helpful and valuable to people. And so you know, when we talk about this, about preparing for this, there are a lot of things that we can do to prepare for these meetings and make them valuables. And that really starts with setting a clear agenda. Here we come back to the prep work. Before each meeting, we sit down and we prepare a very clear outline of what's going to happen. And so that we understand and have talking points of where we're going to go. And this is actually shared out in a Google sheet that all of our team members have access to as well. Also, they can see it ahead of time if they want to, but it's there. And everybody knows what to expect, we can prepare for the necessary documents and necessary resources and talking points.
Meghan 10:09
And this is not Colin and I sitting down for an hour before the meeting and going, Ooh, let's think what do we need to talk about this this week? No, we throughout the week, we put things into the document, too, that we need to discuss for the meeting, things that come up, maybe a client have reached out about something, whether good or bad, or maybe an employee was having trouble with a door at a certain client, and it's one of your regulars. And people need to know that, again, we don't want to waste anybody's time. So we are highly aware of our time management. During these meetings, we allocate a specific amount of time for each agenda item and we stick to that it prevents the meeting from running over on time or in keeps discussions really focused.
Collin Funkhouser 10:49
And that's not to say that if something really important comes up that wasn't on the agenda, that we don't take the time to address that because sometimes that will happen. And we need to be flexible. In our agenda in our time management of going okay, I really wanted to talk about Leash training and leash manners today. But the staff member really brought up a good point about, you know, icy roads. So we need to talk about that right now, actually, so being able to adapt on that on the fly, and not but again, it's about not trying to cram too much. And setting those key priority topics, because that's the third aspect that we have to do is we have to focus on the most critical aspects that we want to get to, you know, we can talk about feedback, scheduling, safety, different protocols, new strategies that we're wanting to do. And we want to avoid covering too many things in one meeting. One problem with a lot of meetings is that they get stacked way too much people go, Okay, I need to make this meeting really effective. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to stack 75 topics in here, I'm gonna hit them on good, I'm gonna talk about each one for 13 seconds, boom, that'd be a really great meeting. That's too overwhelming. You don't have time, or space or mental clarity to actually have good discussions, get good feedback, and introductions or whatever, or however you want to approach that. Allowing your meetings to have room to breathe will actually help them feel more productive at the end of it, because people are have clarity, of purpose and reason for being there. Well, and
Meghan 12:15
also, when you open up the floor to them of okay, you've presented this topic, and then you say, what do you guys think? Or how have you dealt with this? How have you overcome this challenge, then it allows people, you know, two to three minutes to voice their opinion, and they're not feeling rushed? Because you've just laid out, you know, again, 75 topics.
Collin Funkhouser 12:33
Yeah, again, that encouraging participation of people of actually scheduling in a question to say, well, and what do you all think about this? Or have you all encountered this before? Or well, how do you introduce yourself? What's your favorite way of getting that stubborn dog out the door, or getting that cat to warm up to you, and you'll really, if the first couple of times you do this, people are gonna be a little unsure of what to say or how to say it. But then slowly, and surely, if you're consistent, people will start giving their favorite things or what happened the last time they did something, it's just by asking either direct questions to particular employees or staff members that you have that you know, have experienced that, or having more of a roundtable discussion of everybody just goes around and shares one thing. But encouraging that and making sure that it's authentic and not forced, will really get help people to feel engaged and part of a good healthy company culture.
Meghan 13:27
During these meetings, it's important to clearly record any decisions or action items that come from the meeting, we share the document with our employees, so they can go and look at Oh, Amanda needed to do this. And John needed to do this for next week. It's good to assign responsibilities and those deadlines for the action items to ensure that people do what they're supposed to do when you when you tell them to do something, they're going to go do it.
Collin Funkhouser 13:52
Well, it's just so it doesn't fall off anybody's plate, record them and assign them during the meeting. Don't wait till after the meeting to sit back and go Now what did we talk about? Who was supposed to do what? When was that deadline? Because all that's part of the discussion of whatever topic that you're having. So if you're talking about reviewing policies and procedures, or you're wanting input on certain things, give people a deadline during the meeting, because then people can say, well, you know, actually, that's too soon. Or actually, I don't really think we need that much time or however that discussion is going to go but make those part of the meeting so that everybody is clearly aware of what's going on. And then importantly, write it down. That's something that would make a nice say during the meeting a lot of Okay, so let me I hear what you're saying here. You're saying that we need to get this new thing ordered by but you know, before this, the weather changes. I'm writing to my notes right now saying it verbally writing it down. So everybody's aware that there's an action item that's being taken care of really helps make sure that when people share things, when things are being discussed, that people don't feel like it's just going into the ether that nothing's taking place. There's no forward momentum, because that's another reason why meetings can feel like they're a complete waste. time because people walk out of them, I used to walk out of things all the time and go, nothing's happening, right? We're no better than we were the day before. Because nobody's doing anything with this information, it's a waste of time to make sure that they see that forward momentum that those action items are going to take place.
Meghan 15:15
Importantly, then you have to follow up after the meeting, send out an email or a Slack message that says, hey, we discussed that you will do this. And this, we even do this with our one on one reviews and check ins with individual staff, we send a message afterwards that says, hey, we talked about this, we know that you need this time off, we know that you were having trouble with this client. And this is how we're going to solve this in the future, it's important to do that follow up. So it keeps everybody on the same page. And it reinforces the meetings content, and that these meetings are important.
Collin Funkhouser 15:44
And I know we're talking about action items and follow up. And even if there are not specific tasks for the people to do that are in the meeting with you. Still having a follow up of everybody was great meeting today, here are the three things that we talked about. And here's something that we're really excited about or bubble, blah, blah, this is a great discussion, letting them know, right? Again, this wasn't for waste. And here's a quick recap of this so that everybody knows it, because they may have different interpretations of it. That's why the follow up is so important is you can sit in a room with 10 Different people have the same content and data and information presented, they can all experience the same discussion. But they can walk away with a different impact to their life, or what it means for them. And so the follow up really helps nail these down and place it in concrete going, here's what we did. Here's what we decided, here's what's happening. And here's what I have to do. Because of that. It really helps. We talked
Meghan 16:39
about this at the beginning, but set a regular schedule for meetings, like weekly or monthly. But avoid having them too often as it can again, be counterproductive to what you're trying to do figure out why you're having the meeting, what is the purpose of it, then you can see how often do these things need to happen? Are your staff continuing to mess up at little things while you may need to have more check in points have more meetings of Hey, guys, we're not in this alone, we're doing this together, we're here to help each other. And we need to be communicating more frequently in order to avoid these simple little things that we keep messing up. Or if
Collin Funkhouser 17:15
you're in a business that is quickly growing and expanding and moving fast. Having short frequent meetings helps everybody because if you wait once a month or once a quarter to sit down with the team, the whole look and feel of the company will be completely different each time they interact with one another. openly talking about the fast changes the rapidness of clients onboarding or the changing of the service area, or the new services that you're offering, helps, again, people stay engaged, that they know what's going on,
Meghan 17:47
we aren't saying quarterly meetings are bad, they are great. It depends on what the purpose of the meeting is. But for the day to day operations in the field management side of things, you really shouldn't wait until every quarter in order to fix the problems. Otherwise, you're always going to be three months behind.
Collin Funkhouser 18:02
Ask that question when a topic comes up going. Okay, when does this need to be discussed? Is this a quarterly thing? Is this an annual thing? Is this a one on one kind of discuss this in a group setting? We have that a lot when things come up and individual visits will go. Okay. Well, I know we need to take that to the individual senator. But could we discuss this with everybody? Should this be discussed with everybody? And then does it have to be discussed on this next meeting? Or can it wait? So we're looking at the prior again, those priority things of how you want to approach each topic? Because yeah, it's not saying you can't have weekly touch important check in points with the entire staff, quarterly, bigger meetings and get together and gatherings, the one on ones, the weekly, whatever that is for you sitting down and really understanding again, it's so important to know, who am I meeting with? Why am I meeting with and what are we going to talk about?
Meghan 18:57
The last critical step with meetings is starting and ending on time. Be respectful of everyone's time by starting the meeting as scheduled. It really sets that professional tone of this is important. We're going to start now we're not going to wait for the 10 people that are late to come in, we really want to encourage that punctuality as much as possible. And then obviously, yeah, again, respecting everybody's time by ending when you say you're going to end and maybe you don't know, to the minute exactly when you're going to end but but to have a general time we start our meetings at 930 promptly. We don't sit around and wait for everybody. And then we have a stop time at the most by tenant. Yeah, if we can't get through everything by 10am. Then we just table it for the next week. And it's okay. Yep.
Collin Funkhouser 19:35
Nothing is more infuriating than signing up to go to something and they just tell you the start time. How many concerts do that? How many community events organizers will say oh, it starts at 12. My question is always, when does it end? Because I need to know what I'm committing to or what my expectations are? Do I have to show up at 12? Or can I wait a little bit later? So it's letting people know Look, this is in the schedule. It's on schedule. We schedule these Some of our software have from 930 to 10 at the latest, but we generally say okay, we're about here about 15 minutes, so let's get started. It helps people stay engaged and know what to expect. You
Meghan 20:09
always know what to expect with pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and assurance once again at pets@llc.com. Remember, the goal of these meetings is to make them a platform for effective communication, problem solving team building, which will ultimately contribute to the success of your business. These are important. So we want to give you a breakdown of what we do roughly during our team meetings. They are every week, they're about 15 minutes long, which is very intentional. We use a Google Doc, which is shared with every staff member, it shows the employee of what is on the agenda, we view the weekly meetings as a chance to do two things. The first one is address problems that come up the previous week, we want to get input from staff on their thoughts or ideas to solve because they have been in the visits do and they know best practices for each client.
Collin Funkhouser 21:22
It's a great time to share feedback that we get from clients problems, again, problems that came up for individuals that are going hey, look, we haven't encountered XYZ so far. But congratulations, you know, John, you know, this happened to him. Let's talk about what that how that transpired, what we did to solve it and the things that we're going to implement moving forward. Or maybe it's a chance to see, hey, we saw some things break down over the past week. And oh, no, some people struggling with some things. Here's what our ideas moving forward. What do you think a
Meghan 21:53
lot of times, we'll also incorporate seasonal or holiday things in there. So the fourth of July, we always want to look for fireworks that are down on the ground during the winter months talking about our ice and snow, inclement weather policies, what do we do with dogs with certain medical conditions? We also talk about the plan for the upcoming week, we get questions from staff we say, here's what we have coming up on our schedule, here are the some of the meet and greets that we're doing. Remember, this client has this funky thing. So don't forget about that. And then really just ending on a Are there any comments or questions from staff? And that
Collin Funkhouser 22:24
look ahead is critical, because it helps make sure that everybody's on the same page, especially whenever we have clients who haven't booked us in 18 months or two years of hey, remember buddy's on the schedule this coming week? Don't forget about this kind of feeding or this medication? Or does anybody remember what happened the last time that we took care of him who was on that? Do you have feedback? Do you have information that you can help share with other people or a make sure that you check those notes, make sure that they are up to date. And that you know if anybody has any information that they'd like to include on that we can do that. It's it's allows for a broader discussion, because we use a team based approach. And I think that's where this comes from. Because no one person will do the entirety of the care for any one client. This is the point where we can drive that home for our staff, and make sure that everybody morning, afternoon, evening, weekday weekend, staff can understand what the context is for their care. Look ahead at these these notes, these might not be all the up to date, or give us more information so that we could get that added for everybody else.
Meghan 23:28
And I guess that is a good point. If you're having the same sitter do all the visits of every client you met, you will need to tailor these meetings differently. Because while emergencies do come up, and you may need to send in a different sitter, the amount of collaboration within your team is going to look very different. Yep,
Collin Funkhouser 23:46
we need our team to be highly collaborative. So we need our meetings to be open for collaboration is we have to set that platform. We've said that a couple times. But it's so important for the way we operate have, we need to give people and make people talk to one another outside of just slack of sharing their daily reports or anything like that. But let's talk face to face about the problems we're having with this client, let's work together to come up with solutions to things that are happening and to stay on top of the quality care that we know that they want to provide.
Meghan 24:18
Well, in theory that would also lead to higher employee retention, because they're going to see oh, it's not just me on an island out here by myself with no help. And I don't know how to do any of this. And this is too hard. And I quit. It's I have team members who have dealt with the same things. I have bosses who care I have other people that are going to come around me and I'm not the only one in charge of this one pet Yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 24:38
they see the big picture in that moment where they can see two faces 15 faces 30 faces and 30 names where they know oh wow, that person also does Gus and oh look, that person is doing Rosie this week too. And let me talk to them. Let me see what that's like. Let me I know who to reach out to now when I have questions. It builds that morale it builds those relationships that are so necessary for the kind of work that we do. A third component of our meetings is that we try to spend a few minutes on a training topic, usually something that we pull from our field manual, or as Megan mentioned, a seasonally relevant topic. This is where we make people do trainings and watch videos and take quizzes on our field manuals on our operations manuals. But during our meetings, it's another time for us to reinforce specific topics of Hey, everybody. Remember on page 112, this is where we're going to talk about such and such topic that's really important for how we operate or that we might not all remember, or whatever, or here's an update to the new procedure that we wanted to announce. And you'll be getting an update through that through online to sign. It's just a way to keep things and information fresh for our employees.
Meghan 25:51
This can all seem really daunting when we're talking about all of these possible topics that we cover, and all these meetings and of people showing up and you having to perform and be the boss and be the leader. But it really doesn't have to be scary. They can be 10 to 15 minutes, they can be every other week, you can make it however you want to to fit your business to fit your lifestyle to fit the goals for your company, it is possible to do this and not be overwhelmed that
Collin Funkhouser 26:14
simple format of the look back for a week and the look forward for a week or whatever frequency you want to do a look back to review, a look ahead to plan and involve your team in that. It's that simple. Once you get comfortable with that, then you can add on additional trainings, additional discussion points, additional action items, but just something simple of, hey, let's review what happened the past two weeks, what problems encountered things, unexpected happen, issues that came up client concerns, maybe great client feedback or reviews that we get praise people, then let's look a week ahead and plan to make sure that we can be consistent. If that's all that you do. You have done an excellent job of working, guiding, planning and mentoring your team.
Meghan 26:59
If you have team meetings in your company, we'd love to know how you structure them what you talk about how you run them. You can email us at feedback at petsitter confessional.com. or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional. Thank you for listening to this. Hopefully it was helpful and thank you also to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode. We will talk with you next time. Bye
