Weekly meeting in our company

Plan together

What makes this meeting valuable is that we plan work for the week ahead, synch up with what others on the team are doing, and make sure that we’re on track to accomplish our quarterly goals. (Some of this time is spent as a working session, which is why the meeting is two hours long.) We use Trello to organize our workflow, so during the meeting we display the Trello boards on the conference room TV using Highfive. The wireless screen sharing feature is also useful when team members take over the screen to present project updates. Handover is seamless between participants in the room and those attending remotely.

Make time for a break

No meeting should go longer than an hour without a chance to get some water, shake out the legs, or check urgent messages. It helps people avoid multi-tasking during the meeting as well.

Share ideas & insights

We have special discussion topics every week that help us connect as a team and teach us things beyond our core role. A few examples are:

Wins: We all share a win from the past week.

“When I Was At…”: Someone tells a story from a previous workplace, such as a challenge they faced or a tradition we might consider adopting at Highfive.

“Word on the street”: While this sound like it would be a juicy secrets session, it’s actually an effective way to share information that hasn’t had a chance to circulate. We might talk about new developments in our industry, a project another team is working on, or features that could be in the pipeline.

Include other teams

We have two additional participants in our weekly meeting: a rotating member from the support team, which works closely with customer success, and someone from the marketing team. Involving marketing not only strengthens the relationship between our teams, but also enables us to channel what we learn from customers into new resources. For example, if we start talking about customer best practices that we’ve observed, marketing can transform that intel into a blog post or webinar.