Early Years Managers - Let’s Talk Staff Meetings

Whether it is a weekly, monthly, half-termly or termly meeting; does the term staff meeting fill you with dread that makes you want to hide and curl up in a ball? Staff meetings can be an effective way of building upon your team relationships, sharing updates, concerns, and information with a lot of people all at once. But from my experience as a manager, they can also be, incredibly hard to get all staff to attend and very quickly become a negative experience or activity that just feels everyone with dread.

So, how do you get the most out of your staff meetings. Here are some tips from my experience as an early year’s manager.

1)      Have a timed agenda – have an agenda that is shared with staff prior to the meeting with timings for how long different activities will take. Try and involve staff members, for example, could the designated safeguarding lead do the safeguarding section. Involve the team as much as possible so that they don’t have to just listen to you for an hour or an hour and half.

2)      Food – whether it is ordering a pizza, having a home-made chilli or plenty of sweets and crisps, I used to find a team that eat together work well together. And also, it is a token of extreme gratitude to feed them when quite often these meetings happen in the evening outside of their working day.

3)      Continuous professional development – ensure that staff meetings always discuss CPD, whether that is someone feeding back about a course that they have been on. Or it is doing an activity with a CPD focus, such as, using our key point discussion cards that you can find here.

4)      Set ground rules – e.g. no mobile phones, how we expect people to talk to one another.

5)      Pay your staff for their time – recognise that staff are coming outside of their working hours and ensure that you show how grateful you are for their commitment by paying them.

6)      Be confident and assertive – it is okay to say, “Thank you Tina for bringing that to my attention. I would like to explore this more but don’t think now is a time. Let’s meet tomorrow and discuss it just us!” It can be very easy to have the feeling within a staff meeting that you as the manager are being ganged up on, but it’s okay to revisit at a more appropriate time. And remind staff that you are available all the time, so we don’t need to save issues up for a staff meeting to be discussed, which sometimes then just escalates a problem that would not have been a problem dealt with at the time.

7)      Stick to your time – after a long day at work with then a staff meeting and early day the next day. Trust me, no one wants the staff meeting to run over. So be realistic about how much you can cover in your designated time.

8)      Comfort – do you have enough adult size chairs for staff? Are they going to be comfortable as you sit around? We have all done meetings on baby chairs, with tired limbs and aching legs as we try to focus and listen, feeling almost impossible. Comfort is key do you have some adult size chairs, or could you use a different room somewhere, where everyone will be more comfortable.