Submitted by jay2k on
in
Forums
I am currently strugling with finding an appropriate time and way to hold a weekly staff meeting and wanted to see how others have handled similiar situations.
I am currently a Manager over a Help Desk and IT Procurement that supports 400 employee's. I have a requirement to maintain phone/support coverage from 7:00 AM - 5:00 PM each day. I currently manage 5 employees on my team, all with phone coverage responsibilities.
Today, instead of a Weekly Staff meeting, I hold daily 15 minute stand-up meetings. During the daily meeting, all team members remain in the queue to answer incoming phone calls. This creates a lot of interruptions, as some calls do come in during the meeting.
A typical daily meeting includes covering any major issues, announcements from me, and then a round robin where each person talks about what they have planned for the day and if they are having any problems they need hep with. I find it difficult to provide announcements, as this generally causes our meeting to run-over. Additionally my announcements aren't heard by everyone, so I have to come back later and cover them with employees that were on the phone.
I would like to go to a weekly staff meeting, however my boss has told me that we cannot a lapse in coverage. I've thought about having one person stay behind each week, on a rotation, and provide coverage while I conduct the staff meeting. I would then go back and update the person on what they missed.
I wanted to see if anyone else faces a similiar problem and what they have done to overcome it. Thank you in advance for your input!
Staff Meetings While Trying to Maintain Coverage
This is a tough situation. I don't recommend rotating a person out if you have a high call volume. Once you have to handle a queue by yourself, you won't be eager for your turn again.
Can you get everyone together a 6:30am once a week or at least once every other week or 5:00 - 5:30 pm?
If not, I would post announcements either on a bulletin board, internal webpage or email, then review the announcements in each employee's O3 to handle questions, and check for understanding.
-Vince
Find a way
I asked this same question here about 18 months ago. The best answer I got was "find someone else to cover the phones for a while". You *don't* want to split your team up for the team meeting, and if you just post notices, you're losing out on the biggest benefit of the staff meeting (team bonding).