[Kaizyn]

Question: Is your team meeting necessary every week? If there isn't a set of issues that need to be brought up, then you should seriously consider skipping meetings.

At a minimum, the following things should be kept in mind for running meetings: 1) Send out an agenda for the meeting beforehand a minimum 4 hours (half a day) ahead of time to allow everyone enough time to read it. Have printed copies for everyone attending can be helpful as well. 2) Use the meetings as a forum only to disseminate information to your team or to make decisions. This one is crucial. If you aren't making decisions, the meeting is a waste of everyone's time. 3) Have a fixed time each week that team meetings are held so that everyone can plan ahead to be available to attend. 4) Keep the meetings as short as possible. Hopefully with a rather focused agenda and restraining your meetings from turning into a discussion forum, you can keep the team meeting to an hour or less.

No one likes meetings that feel like they're a waste of time. Also, by making the focus of the meeting on decision making, you stop it from degenerating into endless discussions. By keeping them short and focused, everyone will be more likely to think that the meeting was useful for them to attend.