The All Staff Meeting

We just finished one of our 3 yearly All Staff Meetings this morning. We do one at the end of each of our three “seasons” scheduled along each of our three yearly Board of Director’s meetings. The meeting allows the entire staff to hear and interact with the same information that our board receives, including the results of the previous season and a look ahead to the rest of the year.

The meeting has evolved over time, moving from something that might be compared to a locker room speech to a more businesslike model. We continue to try to balance being “businesslike” and having that pre-game locker room feeling. Depending on the meeting we tend to lean one way or another.

The tone of today’s meeting clearly leaned towards more businesslike. Part of the reason was the large number of items on the agenda.

Our standard agenda includes:

    Performance against our goals (see our weekly huddle goals –click here)

    Progress on Key Initiatives

    Ministry highlights and stories

    President’s message (content varies meeting to meeting)

    One other topic

We share the presentation responsibility among our management team. Today we had 7 different people present. Our goal is to share information quickly and succinctly allowing time for questions and comments by staff.

One of our biggest challenges has been the growing number of staff who have offices outside of Evart, MI. We’ve struggled finding reasonably priced technologies that would effectively include remote staff. Today, by using GoToMeeting, we had our best “technology” meeting yet, marked by a relatively high interaction between people in 6 locations. Not perfect, but less costly than people driving to the location.

Finally the highlight of these meetings is the simple fact that the entire SpringHill team is “together”, which, for me, is always a great thing.