How to Make Your Next Meeting Fun

Copyright © 2017 Colorado Speakers Network.  All rights reserved.

Office meetings are meant to get your office team or leaders together to discuss or work on how you're going to accomplish the company's mission, vision or goals. When office personnel hear that there is going to be - yet another office meeting - they may roll their eyes and sigh, but there are ways to make them creative and fun. With a little planning and determination, you can help your workers or leaders get energized toward doing their jobs and help your office meetings succeed.

Here are some creative ways to make your next Office Meeting both fun and a success:

Solicit Employee Input

First off, no employee wants to participate in something he or she feels like they had no input in at all. One of the best ways to start your meeting off right is to make sure you had employee input to begin with. Each office meeting is meant to benefit your people, so they will want to help find ways that can benefit them and their co-workers.

Plus, you want to give them some incentives for attending, especially if it is held after regular work hours. One thing you can do is to let them change into more comfortable clothing right before it starts, that makes things more relaxed. Plus, you can provide useful benefits like giving attendees light food and cold drinks or hot beverages.

Role-Playing Gets the Team Going

One of the fun activities you can do on the day of your Office Meeting is some sort of role playing exercise. This helps the employees gain confidence in their abilities to handle situations, deep discussion, and it helps to reinforce new tasks, using new gear or software, etc. Be sure to make it easy going with people in teams instead of single roles. They might even be able to do it from their seats if possible. The best thing to do is give them some sort of script, but then allow them to amend it as needed to fit the situation. Make it real situations, like how they would react to an angry customer, how they would teach or coach up a new employee on a particular process, etc.

Play the "Real Organization Chart" Game

This helps to get employees to think about how the organization works. Pass out blank organization charts to everyone. Then, they should fill in the chart on how they think the company is organized, and then everyone compares it. Sometimes this can really help to break up communication issues and find out if there are any roadblocks making it hard to get things done in your organization.

One Minute Action Plans

This helps to get commitment from your employees so you know they are using their training and that they really understood the goal of any training they got. They are to think of the most vital thing they got from any training they attended. Then, they must take one minute to write out an action plan regarding that vital concept on how they plan to use it in the organization. You can then have people compare their plans with each other to drum up some good conversations on implementing useful aspects of training you have given and they won’t just have the information go in one ear and come out the other while people just sit in the meeting and play on their phones.

Have Teams Build Something Together

One fun way to build teamwork in a meeting is to make groups build something together. For example, give each group a bunch of soda straws, marshmallows of different colors, and other bits and pieces of materials they potentially can work with to build something. Then, tell the groups each to construct some type of office building or chose some other kind of building. They have to learn to work together to do this and the exercise is timed, perhaps give them 15 minutes.

After the time is up, the teams get to show off their creations and tell what made it work and what didn’t, i.e. John was a great leader, and his directions helped make our building a success or Gail wouldn’t take any advice and that is what caused us to fail.

The important thing is that your employees are vital to your organization. If they don’t know how to work together, get bored or feel they are not being challenged, then you will eventually have problems. So, use your Next Office Meeting time wisely by adding one or two fun activities that will engage workers and teach them how to work creatively in harmony.

- End -