Category: Meeting Rhythms

The Annual Reset: Your Comprehensive Guide to Annual Planning

Avid sports fans start every season full of optimism about their team’s prospects, regardless of the previous season’s results. Cleveland Indians fans, despite a championship drought of 72 years, believe each baseball season brings an opportunity to win the World Series. And during their epic run of eight consecutive NBA titles from 1959 to 1966, the Boston Celtics were always working to one-up their previous season’s achievements. 

While business is not a game, it still has a “season” – the calendar year from January to December. Like a sports team, the beginning of each new year is a psychological reset for leaders and team members. It’s a time to reflect on past performance and plan adjustments to improve in the upcoming year. 

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What’s the Score? Is Your Organization Winning or Losing?

When we think about sports, we typically imagine feelings associated with fierce competition: the joy of winning and the agony of defeat. However, organized sports are a great case study to learn basic business principles. Many of these concepts apply to our organizations and they can dramatically contribute to achieving our goals.

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5 Ways to Show Appreciation for Remote Team Members

A critical component of any healthy organization is regular appreciation and recognition of team members. During normal business conditions, it’s easy for leaders to get distracted with the day-to-day operations and forget about this task. The current COVID-19 crisis forced most teams to work from home. These team members are out of sight, which makes it even easier for leaders to get complacent with the critical responsibility of appreciation and recognition.

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Nonverbal Communication is Critical in a World of Written Text

Communication is a critical component of all businesses, especially during the unpredictable events of COVID-19. Whether it’s your Daily Huddle with team members or external communication with customers and vendors, effective communication is one of the foundations of successful businesses. So, it’s no surprise that there is a constant flood of new apps to improve your organization’s communication. 

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The Essential Business Meeting: A Leader’s Guide to Implementing the Daily Huddle

A biological clock inside us establishes a natural rhythm to life. The circadian rhythm repeats every 24 hours and influences our sleep, body temperature, and organ functions. Additionally, we adapt to the changes in our natural environment caused by the cycles of our planet. Humans understand and depend on rhythms. 

High-functioning businesses also have a rhythm that aligns and synchronizes team members with their environment. To establish this rhythm, your organization needs a daily meeting to set a cadence similar to our body’s circadian rhythm. This critical meeting is called the Daily Huddle, and hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world conduct the meeting every day. 

During these times of uncertainty and daily changes to our work environment, this meeting is even more critical, especially if your team has people working remotely. A traditional office environment has a built-in daily rhythm based on when team members arrive in the morning and leave in the afternoon. The workday rhythm is natural to see, align, and utilize. But when team members work remotely, it’s easy to lose connection with the company pulse. 

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7 Tips for Better Conference Calls

If you’re like the rest of the business world, overnight, you found your calendar filled with video conference calls. The nature of the COVID-19 crisis has many of us working from home. While the long-term impacts of the coronavirus are unknown, I’m confident that the increased usage of video conference tools will be with us for a long time. 

Whether you’re hosting a video conference call or participating in one, these seven tips will help you have efficient and productive online sessions.

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5 Tools to Improve Any Meeting

People have a love-hate relationship with meetings. On the positive side, we all know it’s essential to meet and share information, identify challenges, and brainstorm solutions. But on the flip side, most team members view meetings as a distraction from being able to get “real” work done. 

Where’s the disconnect? We know we need communication, but nobody wants to meet. Maybe it’s because your meetings are ineffective and don’t satisfy the needs of your team. Here are five simple tools to improve any meeting.

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Disconnect Your Accounting Rhythms From The Annual Calendar

The “year” defines the amount of time it takes the Earth to make a full orbit around the sun. During this lengthy journey, we experience 4 seasons, 12 months, 365 days, 8,760 hours and 525,600 minutes. But what does our planet’s trek around the sun have to do with the accounting rhythm of your organization? The correct answer, unless you are a farmer, is: Nothing.

The calendar year is simply a construct made by humans to help explain and predict the seasons of our planet. It shouldn’t have as much impact on business as it does. Frequently I hear business leaders talk about their annual budget, or this year’s sales goal. Many bonuses and incentives are based on annual targets. But why should a sales goal be based on the amount of time it takes our planet to travel 92.96 million miles? They have no direct connection.

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