Staff meetings are meetings run with senior leaders in your organisation. Typically, these would be your direct reports but can extend to the senior managers in your organisation too. It is common for other supporting leaders not in your organisation to join the staff meeting; for example, HR business partners join staff meetings to ensure people issues are discussed on a timely basis.
Staff meetings are an extremely important forum to discuss policy and strategy, track progress of OKR’s and key metrics, surface problems and challenges, and provide a forum for key leaders to work cooperatively as a leadership team.
Staff meetings should be conducted weekly, at the same time and same place. An hour is sufficient, but in particularly pressing times, it is perfectly acceptable to extend the staff meeting longer. However, don’t make a habit of long meetings. Staff meetings are meant to be crisp in tone, and long meetings are not the best use of time of the leaders in your organisation.
It helps to have a person own the agenda of the meeting and to ensure key issues are surfaced in a timely fashion. In executive leadership groups, such a person typically has the title of “Chief of Staff”. However, this formality is not necessary for most leadership groups. Commonly, a shared Google Doc works well enough in allowing meeting attendees to surface their agenda items. Some leadership teams (especially those in fast moving organisations) go further by allowing meeting attendees reorder agenda items so the most critical items get discussed first.
Common agenda items are administrativia, goal setting and reviews, strategy, people management, performance appraisal, and crisis management. Most of these items have a regular cadence to them; eg monthly OKR reviews are common, and half yearly budget reviews are part and parcel of most organisational rhythms.
It’s not necessary to have detailed meeting notes, but it is important to capture key decisions, action items, PIC’s, deadlines as well as who was present when decision were made. Reviewing past action items and deadlines regularly is also a useful exercise.
Every staff meeting needs to have a chairperson, and that person typically is the most senior leader in the room. The role of the chairperson is to frame the conversations, allow for balanced debate, provide psychological safety for the most difficult topics to be discussed, keep the tone of conversations collegial, and drive the team towards collective decision making.
Interpersonal and inter-team dynamics can be complex, and the chairperson has to be aware of these dynamics. It is very much the chairperson’s job to ensure that the right discussions are being had and the best possible decisions are being reached. It goes without saying that much in the role of being an effective chairperson comes with years of experience; it is not something one can master from reading books.
Well run staff meetings provide a predictable (and somewhat comforting) rhythm to the organisation. They are necessary to provide direction to the leadership team, and ensure problems get dealt with in a timely manner. As the leader of your organisation, it is on you to ensure staff meetings run regularly and that you set the right tone for these meetings.
For reference, you can read: