What Happened When I Made My Team Do This 19-Minute Meeting Every Morning This 19-minute meeting will make your team more productive every day.
By Tommy Mello Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Let's be real, guys. Team meetings are often the No. 1 waste of time for companies. But, you're not just wasting time with bad meetings. You're pouring money down the drain.
Related: 7 Ways Business Meetings May Be Killing Your Profits
That weekly meeting you have with your top executives? Depending on how much you pay them, multiplied by the time you all spent in the meeting, it could cost you thousands of dollars for just one meeting. And that could be a conservative estimate; according to Bain & Company research, one company calculated it spent $15 million annually on one regularly scheduled 90-minute meeting of midlevel managers.
No wonder Mark Cuban said this in an interview with author Kevin Kruse: "Never take meetings unless someone is writing a check."
Why? Firstly, many of these meetings lack a firm purpose. You're meeting ... just for the sake of meeting. Secondly, these meetings are often dominated by high-ranking people. No one ever asks for the input of junior staff.
Rather than run long, boring, non-productive meetings that everyone dreads, why not switch it up a little?
At my 200-employee company, we have a very specific morning ritual we do every day. I call this the Morning Mojo Call. We've been doing this since last year, and it's worked fantastically for us.
Related: 8 Steps to Take After Booking a Meeting to Make Certain the Meeting Is Productive
Here's the best part: the Morning Mojo Call only lasts for 19 minutes. The short call time makes sure people practice the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) rule when talking -- no more rambling! Here's a specific breakdown of the points we go through during our Morning Mojo Call. Think about how these will work for your company, and how you can incorporate them into your own ritual or routine.
1. Sharing sales results (3 minutes)
I'm not saying you want to foster a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog culture in your company, but you definitely should be encouraging healthy competition. How do you do this? Well, have one of your salespeople share his or her sales results during your Morning Mojo Call. The salesperson can also elaborate briefly on why he or she performed well or badly, and how to improve from there. This ensures that there is accountability, and makes it difficult for employees who aren't performing to slide under the radar. Keep your salespeople on your toes, so that they won't slack off and accept mediocrity!
Related: This Company Installed a Tomahawk Throwing Target to Spice up Boring Meetings
2. Company updates and sharing of key metrics (2 minutes)
Next, move on to share company and department updates, and also touch on key metrics, such as the number of leads generated by the marketing team. This will help to align your different departments and put them on the same page. The goal is to purely share information in the most efficient way possible, not create discussion. If needed, teams can get together later to discuss deeper on any of the information shared.
3. Role-playing with team members (10 minutes)
Leadership is best done through example, so we go through different scenarios and practice different strategies, including how to respond to a customer in various ways. We usually broadcast our role-playing so that remote employees can see it as well. This is the most effective tool in our sales playbook -- with this, your salespeople can learn how to handle customer objections in a hands-on way. Make sure that this is a two-way process: Demonstrate how you would do things, but also pay attention to how your employees are doing it (and why). For me, this helps me gain insights to improve our overall systems and processes.
Related: 4 Meeting Mistakes You're Probably Making and How to Fix Them
4. Celebrating wins (2 minutes)
After all that knowledge-sharing, lighten things up a bit. At this stage, we go over the top three online customer reviews we've gotten. We also reward our technicians who have gotten great reviews with a token sum of $20, and make sure our employees understand that reviews help us rank on search engines, bringing about more exposure and sales for the company. In your case, think about the metric that matters the most for your business, and celebrate any good results your team has got.
5. Recapping goals (2 minutes)
In the final part of our Morning Mojo Call, we go through our goals and motivate each other to keep working hard. This does two things: It ends the meeting on a high note, and it rallies the team around one common mission.
Feel free to fine-tune the ritual based on what works best for your company, but know this one thing: Your employees are depending on you to lead them well, and help them achieve their full potential. By incorporating this simple activity into your company's daily routine, you'll be giving them the leadership they need to be A+. All onboard!
Related Video: How to Wrap Up a Meeting
