Does your team dread company meetings?
My teams have realized that having effective meetings—specifically Level 10 meetings—make the difference between wasting time, tangential discussion and hee-hawing and solution-driven meetings with actionable outcomes. Earlier this month one of our team leads, Craig Blanzy, discussed how our team meetings have become effective strategy-driven and problem-focused sessions aimed to resolve on-going and new issues rather than a platform for unfocussed banter.
What we have learned (and what Craig helped communicate to other IT service providers) is that IT departments need to communicate effectively to not only resolve user issues, but to prevent old and new issues from occurring in the future.
From IT help desk, IT projects, IT support all the way to our programming team and auxiliary teams, an effective process-driven meeting platform immensely helps us better our service and support to make your teams more successful. Specifically, meetings need to make you focused on the most important priorities, holding team members accountable for the things they’ve committed to, and identifying and solving issues for once and for all. Level 10 meetings have helped my teams get their work down and communicate to our teams of what they have been working on and their insights into improving our clients’ tech needs.
First, What is a Level 10 Meeting?
When asked to rate your meeting from 0 to 10 (0 being ineffective to 10 being very effective), a Level 10 meeting helps everyone participating. Effectively it is a good management tool to save time. Same Day, Same Time, Same Agenda, Start On Time, End On Time.
Here are the nuts and bolts of a Level 10 meeting:
Start—on time! What a concept! Early is on time and on time is late. You and your team are 5 minutes early ready to roll.
Good News—5 minutes relating to each other about personal experiences.
Reporting—devote everything that is important to your team (or your business) is on track. First, review your score card to make sure everything is on track. Make sure that every goal you’ve set for the quarter is on or off track.
Headlines—share about customers or team members—to know what is going on with your people. Whether there is an issue to be resolved.
Problem Finding—If there are problems with reporting, headlines or news, drop those down into issues.
To-Do List— evaluate last week’s To Do list to make sure they are done. Typically 90% of your To-Do list get dropped off the radar if you don’t track them regularly.
IDS—Identify Discuss and Solve—populate the issues list for the week and prioritize the most important issues deemed by your meeting attendees. Once you’ve identified the issues, discuss the issues and then solve the issue. When the issue is solved, the issue comes off the list and typically a To-Do (7 day action item is created). Next, you will move down your list to address the issues.
Conclusion—the last 5 minutes of the meeting, you recap the To-Do list. Discuss whether there are any cascading messages that should be communicated to the rest of your organization. Then grade your meeting from 0 to 10 (if you rate the meeting less than an 8, you need a reason why to share with the group in hopes to improve the next meeting).
While traditionally, Level 10 meetings have been thought of as executive team or leadership team meetings, level 10 meetings are immensely effective for any regular meeting within your organization—marketing, sales, operations, financials—whatever weekly meeting your team needs, a level 10 can easily fit the bill.
But what many of us struggle with is keeping our meetings on track—even if we have an agenda—a series of points to discuss (such as the agenda I’ve described above in the typical Level 10 meeting). What we’ve found keeps us on track (and I put myself in this group!) is having a focused tool that holds our meeting attendees accountable.
We have internally developed level 10 meeting tracking software (and have been optimizing over several years) that brings our meetings effective devoted focus to service our customers better. Our meeting tracking and accountability tool helps our teams—whether individual support teams, programming teams, web teams, leadership teams—keep on track and accountable to weekly and quarterly goals to make our team and business the best IT support company on earth.
Does your IT support have level 10 meetings?
Do they discuss the priority issues?
When they meet with you, do you feel like you wasted your time?
We want and expect our clients to stay in the know—and be treated like an enterprise-class company. If you feel like your IT Support team is unproductive, inefficient or have problems keeping you in the loop on decisions, contact us TODAY for a network health assessment (and if you’re interested in making every meeting a level 10 meeting, ask me about our meeting process!).
