staff meeting presentation ideas

Elevate team morale and boost productivity with these positive staff meeting ideas designed to engage and energize your team.

Even the best team leaders go through periods when their meetings just aren’t productive, and the whole team seems disengaged. If this sounds like you, rest easy—there are plenty of ways to bring engaging staff meetings back into your day-to-day. 

A big part of enhancing meeting engagement is simply going outside the box. Instead of building out your typical staff meeting agenda, try your hand at any of the positive staff meeting ideas detailed in this blog post.

Best practices for positive staff meetings

• 27 positive staff meeting ideas

Tips for maintaining meeting positivity 

Positive staff meeting ideas look very little like how you’d typically put together a team gathering. That said, the steps you’ll take beforehand are pretty similar. Here are some best practices for positive staff meetings to keep in mind.

Plan your meeting and set an agenda 

Great meetings have structure and context, and these qualities come from robust meeting agenda templates, customized meeting formats, and AI-generated talking points. You’ll check all these boxes when you use Fellow’s AI meeting agenda feature to create an agenda and send it ahead of your meeting. Plus, with Fellow’s meeting planning feature , you’ll get notified when it’s time to take key preparation steps such as adding agenda topics or sections.

Instantly build thoughtful meeting agendas using AI

Harness the power of AI to save time, get inspired, and enable efficient meeting preparation. Get AI-generated suggested agendas, topics, and talking points right where your meetings happen.

Set expectations

Everyone attending your meeting should show up knowing how you’d like them to take part and what you’re aiming to achieve by the meeting’s end. Lay this all out with a clear meeting purpose , and you’ll be well on your way to a highly positive meeting. 

Assign roles

Anyone on your team who plays a dedicated role during your meeting will inherently be engaged. Appoint someone as your meeting’s note-taker and another person as the timekeeper to ensure each agenda item gets only its allotted amount of time. You should also decide on a meeting facilitator whose role is to ensure an efficient, in-depth, and successful meeting. These team members’ active participation may encourage the same from others.

27 positive staff meeting ideas 

Newly productive team meetings start with these 27 positive staff meeting formats.

• Lunch and learn sessions
• “Two truths and a lie” game
• Professional development group
• Open mic storytelling
• Group fitness classes
• Team potluck
• Virtual reality (VR) experiences
• Book or podcast club
• Community service projects
• In-person or virtual happy hour
• International day
• Outdoor team-building activities
• Board game or video game tournaments
• Theme dress code meetings
• Constructive feedback sessions
• Personal storytelling exercises
• Create a team time capsule
• Role swap days
• Goal visualization boards
• Celebrate weekly achievements
• Silent meetings
• ‘Inside the Actors’ Studio’ interviews
• ‘Shark Tank’ innovation pitches
• TED-style talks
• Arts and crafts hour
• Musical chairs with a twist
• Mindfulness and meditation breaks

1 Lunch and learn sessions

In this series of staff meetings, your team members take turns leading informational sessions while everyone eats lunch. This novel approach to team meetings can be a much more exciting way to share key project updates.

2 “Two truths and a lie” game

Getting to know each other meetings are great spaces for everyone to share things about themselves. The twist with this creative meeting activity, though, is that team members share three things about themselves, but only two of these things are true.

3 Professional development group

Effective staff meetings look at each team member’s current role as well as their future involvement. Team members sharing and uplifting each other’s career goals in professional development meeting groups makes for positive, engaging environments.

4 Open mic storytelling

Sometimes your team needs to let off a little steam or get some sympathy from other team members about a recent work challenge. With an open mic storytelling meeting, anyone can take center stage with an in-depth work story and get the group’s reaction.

5 Group fitness classes

A healthy team is a productive team. Gathering everyone for virtual or in-person yoga, Pilates, or aerobics classes can get everyone’s bodies and minds flowing, thus improving meeting morale.

6 Team potluck

Instead of your next in-person staff meeting pulling everyone away from lunch, combine your meeting with a potluck. This way, everyone gets fed while bringing a dish that shows off their kitchen prowess or speaks to their cultural heritage.

7 Virtual reality (VR) experiences

Team building in meetings can boost morale in settings far beyond the conference room. Use virtual reality (VR) headsets for team-building experiences in just about any setting you can imagine.

8 Book or podcast club

Leadership media, such as the Supermanagers podcast , is highly popular among the executives of today and tomorrow. Host a book or podcast club during your staff meeting to get conversations going about the professional content everyone is consuming.

9 Community service projects

It can feel really nice to contribute to a community initiative or local charity. Gathering your whole team for this (or sponsoring remote team members’ individual community contributions) can increase morale while giving back to your neighbours.

10 In-person or virtual happy hour

After a long week, your team might appreciate light drinks and pub food at a bar near your workspace. Alternatively, for remote teams, set up an end-of-day virtual meeting where everyone brings their own refreshments and snacks.

11 International day

For an international day staff meeting, give everyone the chance to present their background and build a mini-cultural exchange. The more seen you make your team members feel, the higher their morale and, in turn, their productivity.

12 Outdoor team-building activities

For in-person teams, the challenges of hiking together or completing a group rope course can teach your team how to work together in unique settings. That’s exactly what you might try to achieve in a standard team meeting, but outdoor activities are way more fun.

13 Board game or video game tournaments

Winning at board games and video games often requires collaboration and strategic thinking. Carve out some meeting time, whether in person or virtually, for game tournaments to foster these skills in unexpected and exciting ways.

14 Theme dress code meetings

Lightening the mood is sometimes all it takes to get everyone engaged and lead to a productive meeting. A fun, professionally appropriate theme for everyone’s meeting attire can lift everyone’s spirits and result in a much more effective conversation.

15 Constructive feedback sessions

Encouragement can keep team members going, even when you’ve already told them they’re doing well. Building staff meetings around positive, structured feedback can get everyone paying attention and feeling motivated to continue doing great things. 

16 Personal storytelling exercises

When one person on your team shares that they’ve overcome a certain professional challenge, others in the same boat might pay attention. They’ll be more engaged during your meeting—and afterward, they’ll have ample inspiration to jump over their current hurdles.

17 Create a team time capsule

It can be lots of fun to see what your team remembers most fondly about your work. It can be just as endearing to see where everyone thinks you’ll all be professionally in months or years. Gather these ideas in a team time capsule at your next meeting, and open this capsule at a future meeting for a moment of celebration.

18 Role swap days

Start your day with a meeting in which each team member outlines their role and chooses someone else to do it for them that day. This conversation alone can be unforgettable, as can some of the adventures your role-swapped team members embark on for the next eight hours.

19 Goal visualization boards

It’s one thing to have goals; it’s another to draw them out and literally see them on a computer screen. Give everyone at your staff meeting time to craft goal visualization boards, and then ask your team members to provide encouraging feedback on everyone’s aspirations.

20 Celebrate weekly achievements

Meetings can get so focused on updates and action items that it’s easy to forget to celebrate your team’s wins on previous objectives. A meeting dedicated just to this celebration can be incredibly engaging and drive morale and productivity afterward.

21 Silent meetings

In silent meetings , everyone silently reads the same material and takes notes, and then the ideas get shared around the room. The reading alone can engage people, and the unusual format can get everyone’s attention too.

22 ‘Inside the Actors’ Studio’ interviews

For a true infotainment feature during your next staff meeting, pair up team members to conduct short interviews with each other. Your team will be thoroughly tuned in as they learn about everyone’s hidden talents or other interesting facts.

23 ‘Shark Tank’ innovation pitches

Designate some leaders and managers as sharks, and invite your team members to pitch the sharks on innovative workplace changes. You might find your next big improvement, and you’ll certainly involve everyone in your meeting.

24 TED-style talks

Every team member has their own passions related to your work. Put team members in the center of your in-person or virtual meeting and give them a few minutes to speak impactfully on their passions. The frequent speaker changes and unexpected subjects will keep your team focused and excited.

25 Arts and crafts hour

Provide supplies for everyone to tap into their more creative side during your next staff meeting. For a virtual staff meeting, have your organization foot the bill, with a firm limit, for each team member’s own miniature supply shopping spree. Your team can then take the imagination they harness during this unique meeting to their everyday tasks. 

26 Musical chairs with a twist

Encourage rapid-fire problem-solving with quick, thrilling challenges whenever someone loses at musical chairs. You’ll bring joy to your meeting and develop skills that are useful long afterward.

27 Mindfulness and meditation breaks

Try a 10-minute introductory mindfulness and meditation break at your next meeting. This can provide a reset button and help everyone focus on the upcoming conversation.

To keep the positivity going at your meetings:

• Give everyone the chance to speak or participate . It’s only fun if everyone is doing it. Make sure you allow everyone the opportunity to take part in your meeting’s unique activity, whether it’s a TED talk or a simple feedback session.
• Regularly ask for feedback . Seek anonymous meeting feedback for unflinching insights into what your team thinks of your positive staff meeting ideas. With Fellow’s Feedback feature , giving, getting, and tracking advice, input, and growth becomes part of your team’s day-to-day.
• Steer conversations toward solutions . As novel as positive staff meeting ideas can be, they’re not just about the fun. Keep your activities geared toward problem-solving to make the most of your meetings.

Give and get feedback as work happens

A healthy and strong culture starts with feedback. Fellow enables your team to share real-time feedback on meetings or gather anonymous feedback.

Parting advice

Meetings are great—they’re your most efficient way to gather your team for problem-solving, project planning, goal-setting, and so much more. As with anything great, though, they can get a tad dull if you keep doing them the same way over and over. Breathe some life into your gatherings with positive staff meeting ideas that put unique twists on your conversations. Don’t forget to use Fellow to prepare meeting agendas and get feedback on how your new meeting formats are working!

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40 Fun Team Meeting Ideas Your Team Will Never Forget

Increase team satisfaction with these fresh team meeting ideas and meeting discussion topics. Includes virtual team meeting solutions.

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Change your meetings from a boring snooze-fest to a time the whole team looks forward to. These 40 team meeting ideas will liven up your discussions and build team rapport—virtual team meeting ideas included! 

Interesting Stats on Meetings :

• People perceive 71% of meetings as unproductive.
• Remote workers feel that 55% of meetings could have been an email.
• 30% of workers think their thoughts are shut down in meetings.
• The number of meetings increased by 12.9% from 2020 to 2021.

Let’s make these meetings awesome.

Ready to level up your team meetings? Watch our video below for more ideas on how to make your team meetings more fun:

Fun Team Meeting Ideas

#1 monday reset .

Get the week started with a meeting everyone will look forward to, the Monday Reset. You can focus on building emotional intelligence with this simple team meeting. 

Emotional Intelligence: Ask, “How are you feeling about the work week?” and pass around an emotions pillow . Allow each person to identify their emotions and dig deeper to identify the secondary and even tertiary emotions. Make this exercise semi-optional. Not everyone has to answer verbally, but each person should take a moment to determine what they are feeling. 

Then ask, “Is there anything I can do to help you this week, or is there any extra support you need from the team?” 

You can provide a couple of minutes for people to jot down their thoughts and even make a course of action for the week. Studies show that journaling improves mental health . 

Even though technically it is journaling, call this time “brainstorming” so those who have a bias against journaling won’t be resistant to the activity.

Pro Tip: Create a calming and quiet space in your meeting room with soothing music, snacks, and a diffuser. Diffuse lavender or bergamot for a calm vibe.

#2 Unique Skill Sharing Meeting

This team-building meeting is a fun chance for everyone to share their unique, obscure, and fantastic skills. Whether it’s a skill like sharpening knives, moonwalking, lighting a match with one hand, or botanical drawing, ask them to share their talents with the team. 

Offer a signup list with set dates through the year that you’ll be holding the skill-sharing meetings. 

Keep the meeting on the shorter side—around 15-20 minutes—so it doesn’t cut into the work day too much but provides a brain break midday.

#3 Outdoor Meeting

How many times have you stared longingly out your window at work? Or wished you just had a window! You imagine the birds singing, the sun shining, the breeze blowing unfettered by work and deadlines. 

So take your next team meeting to the company picnic table. Whether it’s Stanford University , the British Medical Bulletin , or the American Psychological Association , they all agree that working outdoors benefits mental and physical health. 

If your team is comfortable sitting close and being very informal, bring a blanket to spread on the grass. Take some time to enjoy the sun and fresh air. If you can, take a stroll under the trees and breathe deeply. 

A great icebreaker for this meeting could be asking what everyone’s favorite outdoor location is. Do they have a favorite trail, park, or beach? 

Problem Solving or Brainstorming: Take your tablets or computers to avoid papers getting blown around, or skip the tech altogether and brainstorm by tossing a ball back and forth. 

Plan the meeting right before the lunch break and order food to arrive at a set time so you can finish up and have lunch together outside. 

Pro Tip: Let everyone know you’re buying lunch, so they don’t make other lunch plans. 

Level Up: Want to improve the overall health of your team? Set up an outdoor working space. If you have remote workers, offer reimbursement for a membership to their local gardens for a remote workplace.

#4 Team Expedition

Ah yes, the good old days of field trips. 

You don’t need a parent permission slip for this one, but you may want to pack a lunch for an impromptu picnic or find a nice lunch spot to eat after your team expedition. 

Plan a field trip considering who you are as a team and what your company or organization does. 

Here are some sample ideas:

Nonprofit Expedition: Visit another local nonprofit to help refresh your vision and renew motivation and excitement on the team. Call ahead to organize a tour of their premises, and if they work directly with the public, you could ask if the team can volunteer for an hour. 

Marketing/PR/Communication Expedition: Visit an art museum, artist’s colony, or the local newspaper. Remind yourselves of how vital communication is by asking why the artists and writers choose to communicate the way they do and how communication in these settings has impacted culture and history.  

Food-Related Company Expedition: Go on a food crawl to find small restaurants and businesses that sell a similar food or drink to what you sell as a company. Talk with the owners, taste the food and drinks, and reconnect with the passion for what you do. 

#5 Video Montage

The goal for the next meeting: create a video montage. 

Divide everyone into teams of 2-3 and send them out to capture several video clips. What kind of video? That depends on your company, your current goals, and team morale. 

Morale Boosting Montage: Each team must find 2-3 people in a different department to share on camera how your department positively impacts the company’s goals. Limit responses to 15 seconds max. 

Assign each team to a different department so they aren’t battling for people. 

After they record the video (let’s say they gathered video from the Finance department), they have to tell that person 1 thing they are grateful for about the Finance team. 

Personalize the Vision Montage: Help your department connect with the company’s vision by personalizing it. Each team of 2-3 people should brainstorm how to personalize the image and choose one spokesperson from the group to be the talking head for the video. Keep each recording to a max of 15 seconds. 

Pantomime Goals Montage: Have each team brainstorm how to pantomime (record it!) one of your current goals. No talking—only props, facial expressions , and body movements are allowed. 

Once each team has recorded their video, have them send it to you to compile into one video. While doing this, let everyone take a break to chat or eat snacks. Once it’s ready, play the video montage for everyone to enjoy. 

Pro Tip: Take time to debrief after you watch the montage. Ask questions like:

• What surprised you about this process?
• Do you feel differently about other people on the team or in other departments? 
• What did this experience illuminate for you?
• How did it feel to hear other departments talk positively about our department?
• Was it challenging to think of something positive to say about other departments? How did it feel to say something positive directly to someone in that department? 
• How can we continue to build connections with other teams? 
• Did the pantomime clarify anything about our goals? Or did it reveal areas we need to make more explicit or clear? 

#6 Meeting Pass

If the team feels a scheduled meeting isn’t needed that week, they can decide to use their meeting pass. This must be a unanimous decision, and the team can only use the monthly meeting pass once.

Each person can choose what to do with the hour they saved. Some ideas could include:

• Volunteer at a local charity 
• Leave an hour early
• Add the hour to their lunch break for an extra-long lunch
• Power through a project they haven’t had time to finish,
• An hour of professional development

#7 Upskill Meeting

Unlike strange skill sharing, this meeting focuses on learning a new skill relevant to your job. 

Often necessary skills will cross over departments. You may have a Senior Graphic Designer who creates all public design work, but your Human Resources team likes to send out information to their team. In this scenario, your designer could hold an upskill meeting to teach other departments the basics of working in Canva or another simple design program, how to save an image as a PDF, and the difference between .jpg, .png, and .pdf. 

The goal is to share the existing skills of one person with the whole team or with selected groups. This creates cross-departmental communication and rapport while strengthening the skills of your workers. 

Pro Tip: Send out a survey to find out what skills people would like to learn and meet with the team leaders to discuss who might be able to provide instruction on the different skills. 

#8 Product Testing

If you sell a product of any kind, let your team do some unofficial product testing. Gather samples of the items and either provide a goodie bag for each person at the meeting or place samples on a table and let everyone choose what they want to try. 

Ask for feedback on everything, including the packaging! 

Keep it fun and informal, but listen for any meaningful feedback. 

Special Tip: You can also do this with a relevant or competitor’s product.

#9 Office or City Scavenger Hunt

Use this idea either for a team meeting or a mini-team retreat. If you’re holding a mini-team retreat, take the scavenger hunt into the city. If you’re using this idea for a team meeting, limit the location to the office building. 

Divide your team into smaller groups to work together on the scavenger hunt and make it fun! 

• Gather a list of photos, trivia, and locations.
• Plan for the scavenger hunt to take 60-90 minutes.
• Include challenges that require a team effort and require different skills to solve/find.

Get more ideas for your scavenger hunt over here .

#10 I’ve Been Wondering…

Instead of having a formal Q&A session, plan an informal meeting where each person has to start their sentence with, “I’ve been wondering…”. 

Questions can be severe or funny and encourage everyone to participate with openness. 

#11 Make a Product 

Divide the group into teams and give each team a different set of materials to create a product that solves a problem for either your company or your team. Make this a timed activity: 5 minutes for a brainstorming session and 10 minutes for building. 

Materials Ideas:

• Toilet paper rolls and toothpicks
• A roll of paper tolls and duck tape
• Toothpicks and scotch tape
• Printer paper and string
• Ribbons and an empty milk carton

#12  All the Good Feels Meeting

Banish the rain clouds with this feel-good meeting focusing on all the recent good things. 

• Positive Client feedback
• Encouragement from leaders
• Praise for coworkers

You could also create a Kindness Box and ask people to write it down when someone commits an act of kindness . Read the submissions at your meeting, and then pin the paper to a Kindness Board to collect all the good things over a year. 

#13 Finger Painting 

Alleviate some of the stress and pressure of being an adult by having a kids’ activity at your next meeting. Finger painting is one of those activities that are simple and easy to coordinate. 

Stress Relieving: 

Introduce this as a fun, low-stress activity that may seem silly but increases cognitive function. 

Pro Tip: Have aprons, so your team doesn’t have to worry about getting paint on their work clothes. You can also include gloves for those who don’t want the color on their hands.  

#14 Fidget and Play

Keep pens, markers, clay, and fidget toys on the meeting table to make meetings fresh and engaging. 

Encourage people to think with their hands. Fidgeting can be self-regulating , and doodling helps with memory retention and focus . 

Pro Tip: Meetings held in a circular format encourage collaboration and connection . When your goal is team building , opt for circular seating.

#15 Rotating Refreshments

Instead of grabbing the same boring snacks on your way into the office, assign meeting refreshments to your team members. 

Keep a calendar of all the food brought over the year and vote for the best at your annual holiday party . Plan to give a food card or a restaurant gift certificate to the winner.

Special Tip: Invite people to bring their favorite childhood snack and share why they loved it.

#16 Paper Airplane Problem Solving

At the beginning of the month, gather to solve problems you’re facing as a team or individually. 

Write your problem on paper, fold it into a paper airplane and let the joyful chaos ensue! 

Make sure to toss the planes around enough that no one remembers which one is theirs. Then each person should grab a plane and brainstorm for 5 minutes on how to solve the other person’s problem. After brainstorming separately, come together as a team to present your solution and brainstorm further. 

Sometimes you’re too close to a problem or sticky situation to solve it yourself. Asking someone else to provide a solution offers a fresh perspective. 

#17 On Your Feet Meeting 

Americans sit, on average, for 10 hours every day . Not only is this terrible for your body, but the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has also found a connection between prolonged sitting and thinning of the memory region of your brain. 

Next time you have a meeting, plan a stand-up gathering! Get everyone on their feet and encourage pacing or moving around the room during the session. Your brain and your body will thank you. 

#18 Hire a Motivational Speaker

Hand the speaking over to someone else by hiring a motivational speaker. Whether you’re looking to boost team morale or want your team to learn a specific skill, hiring a motivational speaker has many benefits—the primary benefit being a novelty.

According to research, novelty activates pleasure centers in the brain and may enhance learning by activating memory formation. 

Put simply, novelty makes us feel good, and that in turn boosts memory. 

Book Vanessa to speak at your next meeting or event to increase employee engagement. 

#19 Meet in a Japanese Tea Room

Build rapport as you sit together on the floor, relaxing with beautifully made tea in a Japanese tea room. The new setting will be a breath of fresh air, and most tea houses are quiet and peaceful—perfect for a calm team meeting and a relaxing outing. 

If you don’t have a Japanese tea house near you, look for a cozy place serving boba tea or even a cat cafe (as long as no one on the team has a cat allergy!). 

Pro Tip: Sometimes Japanese tea houses include gardens (like this one in Portland or this one in Delray Beach . That’s not something to miss, so schedule time to walk through the gardens. Alternately, hold the meeting toward the end of the work day so your teammates can spend time in the gardens afterward without a time constraint. 

#20 Fishing for Sharks

Give your team a chance to pitch outlandish and big ideas similar to a Shark Tank pitch. 1-3 people can pitch each time. Even if team members don’t get a bite, keep the spirit lighthearted and fun.

Pro Tip: Want to take it seriously? Make sure the pitch relates to a business goal or the overall vision of the company. Also, check out this article to master your Shark Tank pitch skills: Learn How to Sell from Mark Cuban’s INCREDIBLE Sales Pitch

Virtual Team Meeting Ideas

#21 lunch partner.

Pair everyone on the remote team with a partner to meet virtually for lunch (or a coffee break) at least once a month for 3 months. 

Give everyone this list of conversation starters , and let each team decide what they’ll do during their virtual meetup. 

At the end of the 3 months, debrief individually with your teammates. Ask how the lunch partnering went and what they learned from the experience. If it went well, switch up the pairs and give everyone a new lunch partner. 

#22 Show and Tell 

At the start of your next meeting, ask everyone to grab a nearby item to share with the team. 

Ask why it’s meaningful to them and tell the story behind it. 

As a virtual team, it’s hard to feel connected to each other. This activity is a fun and non-threatening way for a remote employee to share something personal during the meeting time. 

#23 Virtual Team In-Person Meet-Up

According to research by Dropbox, even though working from home increases productivity, workers miss the human connection . Give the team a chance for in-person contact by planning a meetup. 

If your team spreads across the US or even globally, this could be tricky. Even if you can’t do an all-team meeting, try grouping meetups regionally. 

If you all work in the same state or city, plan a monthly in-person workday at a local cafe or coffee shop. 

#24 Synchronized Collaboration 

Another way to help your virtual team connect is by finding tools that make virtual collaboration more enjoyable and effective. Miro is a fun tool that makes the whiteboard experience much more cohesive than the Zoom whiteboard tool. 

Explore what you need for collaboration, and then choose your tool so the whole team can contribute. 

Go from this:

#25 Where Am I? 

Even more, fun if you have a team of global nomads, start the meeting by guessing where everyone is.

Let the team know in advance that you’re playing a game of “Where Am I?” so each person can choose a fun or unique place to join the meeting from. As a team, guess their location! 

The location doesn’t have to be dramatic or spectacular. It could even be their kids’ playroom or sitting in the grass in their backyard. 

Wherever they choose, it’s a fun activity for virtual team building.

#26 GIFs Only Icebreaker

Lighten up your next information meeting with a GIFs-only icebreaker. Start the session with a fun short video , and let everyone react with GIFs. Bonus points if you can keep the response to the video going, but with GIFs only!  

Giphy integration for Zoom

#27 Random Costume Meeting

Randomly show up to meetings in a costume. You’ll break through the sheer boredom and existential dread many feel when they first join a virtual team call. 

Get elaborate by raiding your kid’s closet or dragging out old wigs or other costume items. 

But it doesn’t have to be a full costume! Show up wearing a winter ski hat in June or bunny ears. 

It’s good for a giggle and adds an element of surprise to your meetings. 

#28 Word Bomb Meeting

Choose a common work word at the beginning of the meeting to avoid and replace it with a safety word. Here’s an example.

Word Bomb: Project 

Safety Word: Bananas 

Sentence Example: We need to finish the bananas on the deadline.  

Whenever someone says the word bomb, the whole team yells the safety word. 

True, it’s a silly game, but it’s also a unique way for everyone to pay attention to what is being said!

#29 Interactive Meeting 

Instead of droning on endlessly during virtual meetings, encourage interaction using live polls, quizzes, and word clouds. Creating a participatory environment will enable the team to listen and gives them a chance to speak up (even without saying anything audibly).

Pro Tip: Most virtual meeting platforms include at least a poll function but look for extra tools to make the interaction more dynamic. 

Interactive Tools:

#30 Employee Appreciation Meeting

Cancel your next meeting! 

Spend the time you had scheduled for the meeting to send out gift cards to your team. Include a thank-you card expressing your appreciation for something specific that you’ve observed in the last month. 

Sending cards through the mail is a nice touch, but if you’d prefer to keep it all digital, find an e-card platform with integrated gift cards like Punchbowl .

#31 Lunch and Learn (With a Twist)

Add a twist to the standard Lunch and Learn by planning a follow-up meeting. Ask each person to share for 2-5 minutes.

This should include:

• What they learned
• How they will be implementing it 

This encourages critical thinking and helps them to integrate new information into their daily work routine. It will also show you what topics resonate most with your team.  

#32 Kids, Pets, and Plants Welcome

Have a casual meeting that doesn’t ban outsiders from the forum but encourages their presence. 

Whether it’s kids, pets, or plants, let your team show off their loved ones with pride! 

If you have coworkers who care for kids during the work day, make this part of your company culture rather than a one-off meeting.

Fun Team Meeting Topics For Discussion

Start your team meetings with these fun team topics for discussion.

#33 Team Wins Cheer Fest

Give everyone a generous helping of affirmation. After you complete a big project, take time in your next meeting to celebrate what you’ve accomplished. Focus on the positives and start the conversation by identifying what you see as the big win from the project.  

#34 What are you reading right now? 

Get new titles to add to your reading list, as well as insight into what your coworkers are interested in. This question is tried and true and can be asked more than once a year. 

If someone is looking for a book recommendation, this is an excellent opportunity to ask coworkers for ideas of what to read. 

Pro Tip: Set up an office lending library and encourage everyone to bring a book to start the lending library. 

#35 If you had a magic wand, what would you change about our team or company?

More insightful than a feedback box, asking this funny question will supply you with surprisingly honest feedback. Be prepared for negatives you may not have been expecting, and remain calm if someone says something you find personally offensive as the team leader. 

Follow-up questions:

• How do you feel this negatively impacts the team?
• What would you do to bring about change in this area?
• Do you think this is a personal preference or affects the whole team?

#36 If you only had one project you could accomplish in your role, what would that be? 

Get your team to think about what matters in their role. Are they focusing on that or getting bogged down with admin or projects that weren’t originally on their job description? Help them recenter on what is essential.

• What tasks are getting in the way of what you want to accomplish?
• Can those tasks be pushed back or reallocated? 
• Do we need to hire another person to handle part of your workload? 
• As a team, how can we help you succeed with this goal? 

#37 What do you feel good about this week?

Instead of always focusing on the next thing on the to-do list or how much you need to accomplish, take time in meetings to shift to a positive focus. Ask your team what they feel good about to encourage positive assessments and move away from feeling overwhelmed.  

#38 Roadblock Drawing Discussion

Have everyone draw a picture of a current roadblock or problem that needs to be solved and then trade it with the person next to them. Talk about the roadblock and ask for creative feedback on surmounting this obstacle. 

Drawing helps to bring cohesion to your thinking by activating both your left brain and your right brain. You’ll see things more clearly or even in a new light.  

#39 What’s the best part of your work week? 

Maybe it’s the morning muffins or the feeling of marking a task complete. Whatever it is, you’ll learn more about each coworker and what makes them feel satisfied. 

Take note of this as the team leader so you can show them appreciation based on what matters most. 

#40 Team book club

Bring the team together by coordinating a team book club. Pick a book to bring new skills to the team and discuss a monthly reading. We recommend Captivate to build your communication skills! 

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Looking for more questions to ask in your meetings? Check out our 20 Best Team Building Questions For Work (That are Non-Awkward!)

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20 team meeting ideas that will help your team bond

Did you know that your team meetings can be a great opportunity to build psychological safety?

Why does that matter? It turns out that psychological safety is a key factor in boosting team performance. In a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology , researchers stated the importance of psychological safety like this:

Psychological safety is the engine of performance, not the fuel.

People who feel psychologically safe at work are more willing to be vulnerable in terms of contributing ideas or pointing out potential problems. Because they have plenty of support and encouragement to speak up, these folks are more comfortable taking risks without fear of judgment, finger-pointing, or punishment. 

Your team meetings are a frequent and reliable outlet to create a foundation of psychological safety by helping your team form strong bonds. When people have a chance to get to know each other on a more personal level and form a closer connection, they don’t only build familiarity—they build trust.

Curious about how to go about incorporating a few bonding opportunities into your team meetings—without trust falls, human knots, and random questions about desert islands? Look no further. 

Team meeting ideas for new or new(ish) teams

Whether you have a group of long-standing colleagues starting a new project or a cross-functional team of people who don’t know each other all that well, these team meeting ideas will break the ice, loosen people up, and help them feel a little more comfortable before you get into the nuts and bolts of your meeting. 

1. Ask a few non-cringey icebreaker questions

We get it— icebreaker questions can sometimes inspire some groans and eyerolls. But there are some creative ones you can ask to help everybody learn something new about each other. For example: 

• Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
• For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
• If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be? 
• In the event of a zombie apocalypse, what three items would you grab from your home? (This is actually one of our favorites. Check out our Surviving the Apocalypse template if you want to do this icebreaker with a remote team.)

You could even ask team members to submit icebreaker questions ahead of your meetings so that they have some control over what they share and learn. 

2. Do a quick show-and-tell

This game reignites your childhood enthusiasm and also helps team members find out more about what everyone values. 

If you meet in-person, give team members a heads up that they should bring in an object to your next meeting and be prepared to explain what it is and why it’s important to them. This meeting idea works just as well (or maybe even better) remotely, when people can easily grab and showcase something from their own home. 

3. Play “name that tune”

Nothing brings people together quite like music . In your next meeting, play the first few seconds of a couple of different tunes and challenge team members to name the song. 

You could even set a theme for each week, like holiday songs or ’90s hits. Prepare for it to become a beloved team tradition that quite literally gets people moving in their chairs. 

4. Switch up your introductions

Tired of meetings that start with the same old, “Tell us your name and what you do…”? Flip introductions on their head by having people introduce someone else in the group, rather than themselves.

You can pair people up (ideally, they should already know each other) or ask team members to volunteer to introduce someone else. It’s sure to be a far more interesting spiel—and likely filled with some glowing compliments the person never would’ve shared about themselves. 

5. Share some photos

Personal photos give team members a more intimate glimpse at the lives of the people they work with.

Set a theme for each meeting—like your favorite vacation photo, your most embarrassing yearbook photo, or a photo of your pet—and challenge team members to share a relevant snapshot.

Team meeting ideas for motivation

Of course, your team meetings are about more than fun and games. When it’s time to get down to business, these team meeting ideas for motivation will inspire everybody to buckle down for a productive conversation. 

6. Plan a thoughtful agenda

A worthwhile meeting starts before the actual meeting. Your agenda loops people in on what you’ll discuss so that they can come prepared with their best ideas and burning questions. Then you can use your meeting time for meaningful conversations rather than getting everybody up to speed. 

Use a simple meeting agenda template to collaborate with your team and plan an intentional, organized, and actionable discussion. 

7. Celebrate your wins

Kick off your meeting on a high note by using a few minutes to highlight recent wins and accomplishments—whether you call attention to them yourself or ask other people to chime in. 

Not only does this set a positive tone, but it also gives motivation a boost. It’s called the progress principle , which states that “of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”

8. Understand team priorities

If you want everybody to walk out of your team meeting with a clear idea of what they should focus on, try the 5 things workflow .

Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Trello, came up with this format. Every team member is asked to share five things—either directly in a meeting or on the Trello board: 

• Two tasks they’re currently working on
• Two tasks they plan to work on next
• One task that people might expect them to be working on but they weren’t actually planning on doing

It’s a straightforward way to cut through the noise and understand exactly what everybody is (and should) be working on. 

9. Encourage fidgeting

Think intense motivation means sitting still in your chair? Think again. Research shows that fidgeting can actually help people feel more calm, creative, and even more focused.

Bump up the motivation level in your meetings by giving people opportunities to use their hands—like putting small toys, trinkets, doodle pads, or even Play-Doh in the middle of the table. Have a remote team? Gifting everybody a branded fidget spinner could be a good surprise. 

10. Keep a detailed history

It’s tough to feel motivated if every single meeting feels like Groundhog Day—like all you’re doing is constantly rehashing a previous conversation. 

Prevent this repetitive feeling by setting up a weekly team meetings board . Not only will it help you plan a successful meeting, but it also has space for you to keep a log of all of your previous meetings. That means everybody can get the context of what’s already been discussed, so you don’t need to keep hitting the “replay” button. 

Team meeting ideas for communication

For your meetings to be as positive and productive as possible, people need to know how to successfully interact with each other.

These team meeting ideas for communication can help your team members understand how to better relate to one another—and how to more effectively share their message. 

11. Clarify roles

If your meetings currently involve a lot of toe-stepping, it’s time for you to clarify who’s responsible for what. The DACI framework requires that you categorize your team members by:

• Driver: Who’s leading the team, project, or decision
• Approver: Who has ultimate sign-off
• Contributors: Who is involved or chipping in
• Informed: Who needs to be kept in the loop

This straightforward system helps people understand where and how they fit in so they can communicate more effectively.

12. Identify your 4 L’s

Understanding and empathy are crucial for successful communication. The 4Ls retrospective asks team members to identify what they loved, loathed, learned, and longed for in a recent project, event, or sprint of work. 

This exercise is a simple way to reflect back on your work together, get better insight into other peoples’ experiences, and improve as a team moving forward.

13. Create team user manuals

Personal user manuals are another effective way to increase understanding. This isn’t about a technical booklet to help you unjam the printer—these user manuals help team members understand what makes each other tick.

Use this template from Confluence to get started. 

Everybody can fill out their own document, listing everything from their communication preferences to how they prefer to receive feedback. 

Have everyone discuss their pages during a team meeting. Then, retain the pages on Confluence to create a handy reference for new teammates, as well as longtime coworkers. 

14. Understand strengths and weaknesses

All of your team members are unique. Figuring out what everybody brings to the table helps build even more shared understanding.

With this Superpowers and Kryptonite exercise , each team member adds their name to the list. Then they write down two or three of their superpowers and one to three things that prevent them from performing their best. It’ll help them relate to the experiences of other team members and approach conversations with more empathy. 

15. Run an experiment (or several)

The way your team communicates is as unique as your team members themselves. It might take you some trial and error to find the best ways to facilitate productive conversations—so it can be helpful to maintain an experimental mindset. 

Maybe you’ll try asking everybody to close out Slack during your meeting time. Or perhaps you’ll test out a meeting where everybody needs to ask at least one question about an idea before providing any constructive criticism. When your meeting is done, send out a quick survey to find out if people thought it was more valuable. You might’ve landed on an idea worth repeating. 

Team meeting ideas for Zoom

Nearly all of the above team meeting ideas can be used or adapted for video conference meetings.

But if you’re looking for some remote-specific suggestions, here are a few tips and exercises you could incorporate into existing meetings—as well as ideas for a few additional meetings that can help your distributed team connect even more. 

16. Measure the mood

Remote meetings don’t always lend themselves to nonverbal cues, and it’s challenging to get a sense of how team members are feeling. Yet, our emotions provide important context, as research shows our emotions bias our perception.

There are simple ways you can get a feel for the overall mood of your team members ahead of a meeting, like asking them to share a GIF to describe their day or use an emoji reaction to summarize their current frame of mind.

Fun fact: The same part of our brain that processes human facial expressions also processes emojis. 

17. Set up a collaborative space

Your remote team might not gather around a physical whiteboard, but they still need a centralized spot where they can plan meetings and work through conversations together.

This remote team meetings template brings focus and transparency to your team meetings with a collaborative approach (anybody can add cards to the “this week” list), a structured agenda, and helpful notes. 

18. Encourage casual watercooler chat

Small talk might seem pointless on the surface, but that friendly chit-chat is exactly what helps your team members feel connected to one another. Unfortunately, that casual chatter often gets lost on remote teams. 

At Trello, we set up specific Slack channels just for non-work chat. We also utilize Zoom to connect team members who may not know each other during a regular meeting we call “Mr. Rogers,” (yes, as in the TV show “ Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” ). 

Want to try it? Use this watercooler video chat planner to regularly assign people to groups for an impromptu call where they can talk about anything they want. Groups can take a screenshot of their call and add comments about the random things they discussed so everybody can see what topics are bringing people together. 

19. Unite distributed team members

You might not be able to walk past someone’s desk and see their recent vacation photo as their screensaver, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way for your team to share their travels.

The remote team bonding template offers a board where team members can add a card to highlight a recent excursion. They can share a photo and even offer some tips or must-see spots as a comment on the card. It helps unite your team, even if they’re spread across the globe. 

20. Switch up locations 

People probably have their default spots for your team meetings, but a change of scenery can help boost motivation and creativity. So, ahead of your next team chat, encourage everybody to sign in from a new place.

Whether they head out to a local coffee shop or soak in some afternoon sun on their own patio, that change can reignite their inspiration and give a fresh backdrop to your team Zoom calls. You could even ask people to share more about where they’re joining from, if they’re willing to. 

Better meetings, better team

Your team meetings are your most frequent and regular chance to pull everybody together into one conversation. Don’t waste that opportunity on roll call and bland status updates.

Put these team meeting ideas into practice to build stronger bonds, boost motivation, and improve communication. You’re well on your way to not only better meetings, but a better team. 

  For more tips on how to have meetings that matter, check out “Trello’s Guide to Better Hybrid Meetings” from Atlassian Presents: Work Life .

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7 Fun Ideas to Make Your Team Meetings More Engaging

• Christopher Littlefield

In a virtual setting, working hard may come with playing hard.

With more companies adopting flexible work-from-home policies, virtual meetings are quickly becoming a norm.

• Leaders and team members alike should consider ways to make virtual meetings more meaningful and engaging.
• Here are seven simple ideas to make your next video call more fun.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

With companies like  Google  extending working from home until as late as 2021, and others like  Twitter  giving employees the option to continue working remotely indefinitely, virtual meetings are more likely to become the norm than the exception. With this new reality comes the need to start making these meetups more meaningful and fun. How can groups quickly identify easy ways to make their meetings more engaging?

• Christopher Littlefield is an International/TEDx speaker specializing in employee appreciation and the founder of  Beyond Thank You . He has trained thousands of leaders across six continents to create cultures where people feel valued every day. He is the author of 75+ Team Building Activities for Remote Teams—Simple Ways to Build Trust, Strengthen Communication, and Laugh Together from Afar . You can follow his work through his weekly mailing  The Nudge .

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360+ goal & okr examples, engineering okrs, customer success okrs, meeting templates, 1:1 meeting templates, team meeting templates, remote meeting templates, agile meeting templates, the ultimate one-on-one meeting, sprint planning team meeting, first team meeting, biannual performance review, report: high performing teams in tech, report: the state of high performing sales teams, 24 team meeting topics for better engagement.

There’s not shortage of engaging and productive team meeting topics. Check out this list for inspiration to improve engagement at your next team meeting.

Are you ever stuck on a Zoom call and think, Do I really need to be here? If so, you’re probably aware of how easy it is to put yourself on mute, turn off your camera, and check out if the meeting feels pointless. As a leader, this is the last thing you want — and precisely why you need to think through and plan your team meeting topics in advance.

The state of high-performing teams in tech reports that while 91% of people have team meetings, their usefulness was rated just 6.5 out of 10.

This is especially problematic in a remote or hybrid meeting , where competing tabs are just a click away. The best way for managers to keep team meetings on track and participants engaged is by fleshing out an agenda template with clearly defined topics and questions in advance.

Not sure what to talk about? We’ve put together a list of 🔥 team meeting topics:

Introductions

Icebreakers, status updates, upcoming projects, recognition, brainstorming, product training, tools and processes, customer stories, industry news, company news, competitors, weekly learnings, guest speakers, off-topic powerpoints.

Kick-off your team meetings by introducing new members, when needed. Be sure to give them a heads up if you’d like them to say a few words. No one likes being asked to share something interesting about themselves on the spot. 

Forging personal connections can feel like an uphill battle on remote teams, where there’s no communal coffee machine to congregate. At the same time, hearing the results of your co-worker’s cat DNA test might be annoying if you’re there to talk OKRs. 

Icebreaker activities are good middle ground. Allocate 5-10 minutes for fun questions and conversation starters at the top of your meeting. It can help participants get to know one another beyond just work, and also prevent the rest of the meeting from going off track.

Here are some of our favorite icebreaker questions : 

• What are you jazzed about personally or professionally? 
• What’s something non-goal-related you learned this week?
• What are two things you always say yes to? 

Team meetings are a great way to synch— but there’s a fine line between getting everyone on the same page, and getting lost in the weeds. Running through a mile-long list of projects and priorities in excruciating detail won’t be a good use of anyone’s time, and participants may tune out if the meeting is irrelevant. 

Instead, ask your reports to prepare brief status updates that they feel their teammates should know about. A good rule of thumb is that the updates need to be connected to the work of other team members in the meeting (i.e. projects with different dependencies). In other words, it’s not a time to showcase all your hard work. It’s a time to give relevant updates that apply to the group. If you don’t have any, that’s okay! There shouldn’t be pressure to share for the sake of it.

Follow up on status updates with clear action items or next steps.

💡 Pro tip: Consider using a collaborative agenda , where participants can contribute talking points and topics beforehand. This helps prevent louder voices from taking over the meeting, and neutralizes the risk of important updates slipping through the cracks if someone doesn’t have the chance to speak.

Goals should be a team meeting topic every 👏 single👏 week.

Consistently talking about goals is important to both team and individual success. The state of high-performing teams report found that clear goals and expectations had the biggest impact on productivity— more than resources, well-defined processes, or even a good manager. And when goals are discussed weekly, employees are 2.7X more confident in their ability to hit them. 

The point of covering goals in your team meetings isn’t only to ensure your team doesn’t forget what you’re working towards. It also helps your reports see the bigger picture. It’s tough for someone to derive meaning from their work if they can’t see its impact on the company at large— so use your team meetings to show it.

Metrics go hand-in-hand with goals. Reviewing metrics enables you to communicate progress towards team goals, as well as share invaluable insights along the way— especially since some of your reports might not have access to the same data. 

Discussing metrics also provides an opportunity for recognition. It makes it clear when you achieve your goals — which calls for celebration! On the flip side, it also helps you identify areas for improvement and learning.

Speaking of celebration, it’s always nice to feel appreciated by the people you work with. As a people manager, however, you can do your reports one better. Putting team and individual wins on blast serves multiple purposes:

• Connecting specific outcomes to the team and organizational goals, to reinforce the impact of their work
• Fostering high morale by showing (not telling) your team your appreciation for their efforts
• Promoting a collaborative team environment

Celebrating wins positively impacts motivation and productivity across the board, especially when your team is working towards ambitious goals. Save some time for this topic at your next team meeting.

While it’s way more fun to talk about wins, it’s equally important to talk about failures. The key is making sure these discussions are empathetic, helpful, and purposeful. 

Be honest when team or organizational goals are missed. This will help build trust, foster transparency, improve accountability , and give your reports permission to be open about their own mistakes, instead of brushing them under the rug.

Avoid comments like “We failed”, without any additional discussion. Instead, speak with your team about:

• Why this particular failure happened
• What are the important learnings or takeaways
• How you’re going to pivot or course correct

Always avoid singling out individuals for blame— pointing fingers is not the goal. In fact, it’s detrimental to psychological safety, and won’t effectively motivate your team.

Creating an environment where roadblocks can be freely discussed— without any shame— benefits everyone involved. Beyond flagging potential issues, these conversations are the perfect opportunity for brainstorming workarounds and solutions as a team.

For example, someone could be waiting on another team member for something and they have no idea. This conversation will help provide visibility into potential blindspots to avoid future frustrations. 

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

Set a plan of action for how you’ll tackle the upcoming week and where you can support each other. 

Planning together helps ensure you’re aligned as a team and gives everyone visibility into what their peers are working on. That way when unexpected things come up, everyone’s looped into current priorities for team members. 

Use team meetings to give your reports a heads up on new projects or campaigns coming down the pipeline.

If this requires working with other departments, take time to address how it ties in with team goals, and address any priorities that may need to be shifted. This helps ensure cross-team collaborations are set up for success.

According to this Forbes article , 40% of Americans say they’d put more effort into their work if they were recognized more often.

Set aside a few minutes for your reports to formally recognize other people on the team — for big and small accomplishments alike. Creating a culture of recognition on your team can help boost morale and reinforce team values.

💡 Pro tip: Give recognition similar to how you’d give constructive feedback : be specific, show the impact, and don’t wait for a performance review to share!

Team meetings aren’t the time to share personal feedback directed at specific people. Rather, share feedback about how you’re working together as a team. 

A great way to do this is the stop, start, continue, do more of, do less of wheel (that’s a mouthful! 😅). It’s essentially soliciting feedback from the team by asking them for:

• One thing that’s working
• One thing that’s not working
• One thing to do more of
• One thing to do less of

On top of seeking general feedback on how the team is doing, ask for feedback on the meeting itself! How can you make it a more engaging and inclusive meeting for your whole team?

When it comes to brainstorming, the more brains, the better! 🧠 That’s why your team meeting is a great time to run a short brainstorming session. It’s a time when you have everyone in the same room, and can get the creative juices flowing. 

Of course, if it’s going to be a long brainstorm, we recommend taking it beyond a topic on your agenda and conducting a separate brainstorming meeting . 

Product insights offer huge value, but some teams might not know the ins and outs. To help keep everyone in the loop, introduce product training sessions to cover best practices, interesting use cases, roadmaps, and upcoming releases.

If your team isn’t familiar with all the internal tools and processes, this is another good topic to include— especially since there may be underutilized resources or updates they don’t know about. Consider discussing:

• Best practices and guidelines for internal processes
• Tips and tricks for different tools in your tech stack
• New tools that will soon be available
• Process updates or improvements
• Common mistakes to avoid

You can also ask participants to share any shortcuts or hacks they’ve discovered, or invite feedback on a new tool you’re considering for the team.

Your customers can provide critical insights to engineering, product, and go-to-market teams alike. In your next team meeting, try sharing:

• Onboarding call recordings, where customers discuss their pain points or processes 
• Demo call recordings, where recently closed prospects talk about competitors
• Case study interview recordings, where customers describe their use cases and successes
• Customer reviews that mention favorite product features or areas for improvement
• Customer emails or social media shout outs

No matter what team you work on, the more people know about the customer experience, the better off your company will be.

What’s the TLDR in your industry this week? 

Team meetings are a good place to share news related to your organization, customers, and competitors. Instead of a one-way broadcast, however, invite participants to contribute interesting stories they’ve spotted on LinkedIn, ProductHunt, or industry-related publications. 

Encouraging your reports to chime in with their reactions, thoughts, and predictions will help fuel lively discussion as a team-building exercise. This also helps everyone keep up with notable changes in the market.

Beyond just regular company news or events, communicate relevant promotions and employee departures (if possible), as well as upcoming changes to the internal structure that may impact the team.

It’s important for employees to understand what’s going on at the organization, beyond just their team. It helps contribute to the feeling of being part of something bigger. Don’t let your team work in a silo. What goes on at the company-wide level affects them — whether directly or not.

Team meetings are a good time to compare notes on competitors, including new product launches, press releases, and insights from customer calls, emails, or reviews.

Did someone find a new competitor? Keep the whole team in the loop on what’s going on in the industry.

Open the floor for participants to share something they’ve learned, whether it’s a new life hack, skill upgrade, piece of trivia, or random Eureka moment on the meaning of life.  It doesn’t have to be work-related to be insightful. 

I like asking people about what have they learned recently. It always leads to interesting conversations about everything from good books, epic failures, success stories to a-ha moments. Highly recommended – we can all learn from each other and grow this way! — Konrad Pitala (@konradpitala) April 5, 2022

Don’t overlook professional development opportunities in your team meetings. A series of mini-workshops gives participants a chance to showcase their skills, and also maybe pick up some new ones. Whether a crash course on SEO strategy or time blocking tutorial, the possibilities are endless.

You don’t have to restrict team meetings to just your reports. Reach out to other departments, professional connections in your network, and even customers, and invite them to share their insights and advice.

This helps provide opportunities for your team to learn. Plus, it allows you to protect your team’s time by giving other team leaders an opportunity to connect with them in a structured way.

Commonly known as “PowerPoint Parties”, off-topic PowerPoint presentations are a fun way to spice up team meetings and discuss hobbies and interests outside of work.

Is there someone on your team who’s an amazing cook? A great gardener? An expert in Tai Chi? Let them share their expertise with the team! It helps everyone get to know each other and learn something new. 

Even when you plan your meeting in advance, questions will inevitably come up that you didn’t prepare for.  No one should walk away feeling confused or unclear, so set aside a few minutes at the end as an “open forum” for questions.

Likely if one person has a question, there are more people who have the same one. Setting aside some time for questions in your meeting will allow you to tackle confusion in one fell swoop.

Add a new topic to your next team meeting

There’s no shortage of compelling topics to enrich your team meetings. Preparing in advance gives you the opportunity to experiment with different combinations, collect feedback, and make improvements along the way. 

Don’t be afraid to switch things up, see what works, and hopefully have a little fun in the process! Whatever the topic, following best practices for team meetings with a clear, well-planned agenda will help ensure you’re providing value and holding participants’ attention to the end. 

Now that you have team meeting topics down, here are some other resources for improving team meetings:

• The 45-minute team meeting agenda template
• Trending team meeting questions
• 10 icebreaker questions
• Report: The State of High Performing Teams
• Tool: Hypercontext’s team meeting software

…and there’s more where that came from! 👇

What to do now

Now that you've read this article, here are some things you should do:

• We have a massive (& free) collection of meeting agenda templates all designed to help you run more effective meetings.
• You should try Hypercontext to see how it can help you run a high performing org.
• If you found this article helpful, please share it with others on Linkedin or X (Twitter)

Hypercontext helps managers run better Meetings edit_calendar , hit their Goals flag , and share better Performance feedback insights , faster.

20 interactive staff meeting ideas to keep employees engaged

An effective meeting needs two things: an objective and a receptive audience. A room of laser-focused individuals eager to achieve can move mountains. Sadly, most are filled with people who’d rather move back to their desks.

Why the apathy? The answer lies in understanding how your coworkers feel. There are countless articles out there on how to be a better speaker , or design a better PowerPoint . But that’s only half of the solution. Meetings are a communal exercise. As the facilitator, it’s your responsibility to bring out the best in your participants.

At Poll Everywhere, we’re in the business of improving presentations. We’ve compiled our colleagues’ best strategies on hosting engaging staff meetings. Give their staff meeting ideas a shot at your work, and let us know how it went on Twitter via @polleverywhere .

David Politi, Designer

1. help people mentally switch gears.

You should always be mindful of what people were doing before your meeting. Chances are they still have a lot on their mind when your meeting starts. Consider starting with a strong context switch, like a palate-cleanser for the mind.

When I present, I like to engage people really early, even before I introduce myself. I may ask something like, “Quick show of hands: how many people mentor other designers?” It’s not an interesting question, but it gives people a chance to brag so they’re more likely to engage. Next, I’ll ask, “Who wants to mentor other designers?” and “Who wants a mentor but is too afraid to ask?”

At this point, everyone in the audience has raised their hand at least once. They’ve also completely forgotten about whatever they were thinking about before. Now I have everyone’s attention and am ready to start the meeting proper. That’s when I introduce myself and what I’m going to talk about.

2. Ensure your eye-line rests on the audience

Always face your audience when presenting slides. Think about how a teleprompter is set up on TV. It’s always on the same eye-line as the camera to ensure that the speaker is always speaking directly to, and engaged with, the viewers at home.

Breaking eye contact with the audience when you check your notes or slides is an invitation to the audience to to tune out. When you break eye contact with the audience,  they break eye contact with you.  Looking to the side tells the audience that you aren’t speaking directly to them anymore and they can focus their attention elsewhere. They may take this time to check their phone or email. By keeping eye-contact, your audience stays connected to your presentation.

3. Use positive reinforcement to drive participation

Positive reinforcement takes many forms. You can use prizes, gamification, immediate praise to whoever gives the first idea, and so on. This is good for two reasons: it sets the stage for people to get that little serotonin release, and it lets people know that the facilitator will reward them for participating. It is a signal that now is the time to pay attention and participation is not only encouraged but rewarded.

For example, Poll Everywhere employees now understand that when I facilitate a meeting there will be prizes, it will be fun, there’s gonna be toys, and they know that, whether they’re introverted or extroverted, it’s a safe space for them to participate in. They don’t have to worry about being too loud or self-censoring, nor do they have to worry about being heard.

4. Provide small toys for big stress relief

A person’s tolerance for participation is variable. There’s a rule of thumb that states you can get someone to pay attention for 38 minutes before they basically check out. This is a good expectation but you may never know how people are feeling before they entered your meeting. Maybe they had a bad day. Maybe they just took a bunch of cold medication. Maybe they have a date later. All of these distractions can eat away at your 38 minutes.

To counter this, provide scheduled and structured opportunities for each person to check out and fidget as needed. That’s why I provide little toys – fidget toys, tops, rubber bands, robots – for people to enjoy during meetings. Interacting with these items gives people a chance to vent any pent up frustration or excitement without speaking out loud and disrupting the meeting.

5. Always have something to fill the silence

Silence is bad for meetings no matter who you’re working with. Introverts can feel very awkward in silence. That awkwardness can lead to introspection about how people are perceiving them, how their body looks that day, and so on. All this internal noise disrupts their concentration.

On the flip side, extroverts may feel the need to fill silence with small talk. You do not want small talk anywhere near your meeting. It is a divergence from the purpose of the meeting, and wastes valuable time.

If you need silence during a meeting so people can read or work individually, always provide some sort of noise or sensory input. I use a small device called a Buddha Machine that fills silence with meditation white noise. This sound helps participants focus without being distracting.

Sam Cauthen, COO

6. make time for reading before, or during, a meeting.

How to handle required reading is a big divide in the communication world. Should you send it out beforehand, or fit it in during the presentation? Personally, I love the pre-read. It saves you precious time during your presentation, and lets you jump straight to the heart of the matter.

Of course, you can never be certain that everyone will actually read the material. One solution comes from presentation expert Edward Tufte , who asks the audience to spend the first 15 minutes of his presentations reading. This gets everyone on the same page, and ensures they have a contextual baseline for what you’re going to discuss during the presentation.

7. Know that whoever speaks first sets the tone

Pay special attention to whoever speaks first in a meeting. How they talk and what they talk about will rub off on everyone else. They set the tone for the rest of the proceedings.

This means you can tweak the temperament of your group to improve the results of a meeting. Here’s an example: let’s say your staff meetings tend to feel slow and drawn out. Try picking someone who speaks quickly and succinctly, and have them go first. This sets a positive example the other attendees will naturally emulate. You can even work with this person beforehand and coach them a bit on what you’re looking for as well.

8. Know how to resolve conflicts before they start

There are few things that ruin a meeting more spectacularly than a protracted shouting match. In these moments, you need a clear path to conflict resolution that everyone has agreed upon. Whether you have one person decide, put the issue to a vote, or try to reach a consensus across the group, everyone needs to agree on the path and understand why it was chosen. This needs to be done before disagreements happen.

Once you have your path, call out any deviation from it and address why it happened. There’s zero point in choosing a path if you’re not going to follow it. People can disagree, but once the conflict has been resolved both parties must respect the decision.

In a letter to shareholders , Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called this idea “disagree and commit.” It means you don’t throw up your hands and surrender when things don’t go your way. Instead, you agree to disagree and continue to support the group to the best of your ability.

9. Build camaraderie with a shared moment of Zen

Set aside a few minutes for everyone to learn something new. It could be a fun fact someone read in the news, or an inspiring quote. Poll Everywhere’s customer support team, for example, presents a few notable comments made by our presenters each week that the company reads over together.

This creates a ritualized context for something that’s cool and interesting for the entire team. And because everyone is seeing and absorbing this information for the first time, it’s a great way to start a conversation. Everyone is on the same page. There are a lot of podcasts that do something like this as well, and The Daily Show is really good at it with their moments of Zen.

If your team feels uncomfortable sharing verbally, use an anonymous poll at the start of your meeting to open the floor for shared moments. Introverted team members may hesitate to flaunt their achievements of the week, so using a poll breaks down that barrier.

10. Find creative uses for shared artifacts

If you’re running a presentation with multiple speakers, try tossing a teddy bear across the room. A physical object that denotes whose turn it is to speak is a great refocusing device. It’s a visual representation of where everyone’s attention should be. Tossing this object carries a certain energy as well, which pulls people back into the discussion. You just have to be judicious about giving the item to those who aren’t asking for it aggressively.

Google took this idea in an interesting direction. They wanted to cultivate a culture that instills trust by embracing failure – so they introduced Whoops the Monkey .

11. Hook the audience with a strong visual metaphor

In an article for the Harvard Business Review , presentation expert Nancy Duarte said, “Metaphors can help by tapping what learning theorists call prior knowledge to make a connection between what people already understand through experience and what they have yet to discover.”

In a presentation, metaphors can be visual or verbal. Personally, I have more fun with the visual ones. People expect presentation visuals to be all charts and bullet points. Subverting those expectations with a little humor goes a long way towards making your material memorable.

12. Each attendee needs a pressure valve

A pressure valve is simply a way of recognizing and addressing issues that, if left unchecked, could cause bigger problems within the company. At Poll Everywhere, we use a Q&A poll at the start of each weekly staff meeting to crowdsource discussion items from the entire company. The poll is presented from a web browser, people submit items from the privacy of their phones, and the results appear live for everyone to see.

This is a quick and easy way to crowdsource important announcements, coworker recognition, and underlying problems all in one place. It gives everyone a voice and gets important topics out in the open. It’s also far more reliable than the traditional method of using intuition to know when someone has something important to say.

Kelly Arbuckle, Sales

13. let people leave if they don’t need to be there.

Allow people to leave if they don’t need to be at your meeting. If your job has nothing to do with what’s being discussed, and you have nothing to contribute, then you shouldn’t stay just to stay. I’d much rather have somebody leave and go work at their desk than stick around and work through the meeting. It’s disruptive for the other attendees, and less productive for the odd-person-out. Simply reiterate the purpose of the meeting up front – the objective – and kindly remind people that they can duck out if they have nothing to add. That’s all there is to it. No one should feel pressured or obligated to stick around for no good reason.

Similarly, when inviting team members, make sure to mark certain members as “optional” on the Google Calendar invite if their presence is appreciated but not necessary. This gives your staff the okay to leave the meeting if they need to.

14. Set an agenda, share it, and stick to it

Meetings are very expensive. They take time away from people’s day-to-day duties, so it’s vital that you accomplish the goal of your meeting. This takes discipline. That’s why I try to create as detailed of an agenda as possible for my meetings. Agendas cut back on rambling, and help everyone stay focused. If someone has something they want to discuss right now and can see it listed later in the agenda, that steers them back on course.

Otherwise, if their topic isn’t already on the agenda, I make sure they can write it in. Keep your agenda in a place (Google Docs, for example) where everyone can collaborate. That way, each person can see what needs to be covered in the time allotted, and you can keep things moving at a steady clip.

Penny Yuan, Product Manager

15. ditch the chairs if a meeting needs to go fast.

If you want a meeting to go quickly, make everyone stand. People get fidgety if they stand for too long. They want it to be temporary – whereas sitting implies long durations of work. This is why “standup” meetings should require standing. Standups aren’t for extensive discussions. They’re for giving quick updates and assigning action items.

I’ve not done this personally, but I was once invited to a 15-minute meeting in a conference room only to discover the organizer had removed all the chairs. And you know what, it lasted exactly 15 minutes. Sure, some people had that ‘Wait, what?’ look on their face, but it went much faster. It’s also harder to mess around on your phone or laptop while you’re standing, so your attention is completely focused on what’s being discussed.

16. Be careful with the icebreakers you choose

According to Google’s Project Aristotle research, the key to an efficient workplace is psychological safety. This means creating an environment where everyone can voice their opinions without being fearful of being shot down. I like to do this with fun, simple icebreaker questions that get people thinking about a problem unrelated to work. Sometimes these icebreakers help people bond if they give similar responses to a weird scenario.

There are plenty of good icebreaker examples , so here’s one that didn’t work. At a previous company, we broke into small groups and spent five minutes each reciting statements about ourselves. Each statement had to start with, “I am…” or “My deeper truth is…” Guess what? It got really personal, really fast. Five minutes is a long time for personal facts. It was emotionally draining for everyone – which isn’t a bad thing, per se – but then we had to go right back to work. No cooldown. No camaraderie. As a result, it just felt uncomfortable.

Read more: 15 tried-and-true meeting ice breaker questions

Matthew Du Pont, Sales

17. designate an advocate for remote attendees.

A remote advocate is someone who is physically present in a meeting, but is experiencing it from a remote attendee’s point of view. They help remote attendees get floor time during conversations, and ensure the audio setup is functioning properly. In my experience, it’s common for people to speak fast or talk over each during meetings. These factors and others make it tough for people dialing in to know when is an appropriate time to speak. This anxiety can cause them to not speak up at all – benefiting no one.

The way we handle remote advocacy at Poll Everywhere is by having each remote join a video conference with their webcam turned off. When someone remote wishes to speak, they simply switch their webcam on. The remote advocate sees this and announces, “Jeff has something to add,” when appropriate. Having everyone keep their webcam off by default also saves bandwidth and is less distracting for all attendees.

18. Delegate timeboxing and choose a playful audio cue

Moderating a panel discussion can be just as tough as participating. You need to constantly ask yourself, ‘What’s the purpose of this event? Is the current discussion working towards that goal? Should I intervene or call on someone else?’ and so on. The more tasks you can delegate, the more focused – and effective – you will be.

A simple task all moderators should delegate is timeboxing. During Poll Everywhere’s regular planning meetings, we have an employee who delights in hitting a huge gong whenever someone exceeds their 90-second allotment. Choosing a cutoff sound or ritual that’s playful makes it feel more like a reminder, and less like a reprimand. It can actually build positive anticipation in the audience, which encourages contribution.

Jeff Vyduna, CEO

19. create a s.t.a.r. moment for key information.

If you want the audience to remember one thing from your presentation, then you need to spend an outsized amount of time on a single moment. That’s your S.T.A.R. moment. S.T.A.R. stands for Something They’ll Always Remember. It could be an unusual prop or emotional story – anything that breaks from the norm of your presentation and grabs the audience’s attention.

This concept was created by Nancy Duarte, founder and CEO of Duarte Designs . She helped Al Gore design his presentation for An Inconvenient Truth , which included a literal off-the-chart S.T.A.R. moment. In the film, Gore uses a machine to lift himself up above a chart showing global carbon dioxide concentration to illustrate how unnaturally high that concentration could get in the next 50 years. It’s a visually impactful way to drive home that piece of information.

20. Alter your presentation style every three minutes

Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Carmen Simon suggests that presenters change their presentation every three minutes .

She calls this a “cut,” like cutting between shots in a movie. Variation is exciting. People will normalize experiences without variation. That’s why, when someone asks you to describe your favorite part of a boring movie, you say, “I dunno, it all ran together.”

You don’t want your presentation to “run together.” You want it to stand out clearly so that people remember – and act upon – what you said. This brings us back to “cuts.” A cut is a simple transition from one presentation style – lecturing, Q&A – to another. It mixes things up, thereby making each section feel more distinct.

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How to have a more productive team meeting (that staff and managers will love)

The team meeting. A necessary evil, an exercise in wasting time, or your organization’s secret weapon? At it’s best, a team meeting is a way to ensure your staff and management teams are aligned , that no obstacles stand in the way of company progress, and to create an open forum for dialogue and discussion . At their worst, team meetings can frustrate and cause more problems than they solve with many employees facing meeting overload . Can you afford to have bad meetings that could lose clients or cause friction with internal stakeholders when there is a solution?

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As organizations develop more dynamic ways to communicate, the tried and tested team meeting needs an upgrade. You can have more efficient, fun, and engaging meetings with your team. In this article, we’ll show you how!

First, we’ll explore how to organize and plan more purposeful meetings. Next, we’ll show you what to put in your meeting agenda and then we’ll show you how to lead them in a way that generates results and connection.

What is the purpose of a team meeting?

What are the six types of team meeting, what is the importance of a team meeting, how to plan an engaging team meeting, what to put in a team meeting agenda, how to lead more productive meetings, team meeting faq.

At its core, the purpose of a team meeting is to share information efficiently and to provide scope for discussion around what is being shared . A good team meeting helps teams align on the topics of discussion, air any concerns or obstacles, and have clarity on future actions. 

The exact purpose of a team meeting is decided by the topics in the agenda and the business needs of the meeting and your organization. 

Your team meeting might be business-critical – a place where company developments or valuable information or training are shared. Team meetings can also be where your staff are able to spend time together informally and share what’s on their mind. Conducting team meetings to improve wellness, for open discussion, or simply to try something new are all viable reasons to bring your team together.

Key to a successful team meeting is to always have a clear purpose. Define what it is that you are gathering people for – their time is as precious as anyone’s and if they think it’s time wasted, it will work against you and certainly won’t energise the team! Jane Mitchell , Founder JL&M, Director at Karian and Box

The most productive and effective team meetings have a clear purpose in mind. As a manager be sure to identify the purpose of your meeting, whether it is to align your team, to have fun and get to know new members of staff, or to deliver business-critical information. Going into a team meeting with a clear purpose helps ensure you can stay on track and be more successful as a result. 

Not all team meetings are made for the same purpose. When you’re looking for team meeting ideas and what kind of meeting you should run, it’s helpful to consider your purpose and what you want to achieve.

Here are some of the most common types of team meetings, with a rundown of what they might involve and how you might run them.

Status update meetings

A status update meeting is one of the most common meetings you will lead, and one you will likely perform on a regular schedule. This often involves giving status updates on current projects and ensuring alignment on next steps for the week. The status update meeting might be a general catch-up, where staff and stakeholders can brief the team on their progress and give a general overview of their status. This helps teams stay aligned and discuss any challenges or barriers .  Regular meetings to discuss the status of a project are hugely helpful in ensuring everyone is moving forward in the right direction. They can help remove blockers and support further work while giving the project manager everything they need to manage effectively.

Information sharing meetings

All organizations will have information they need to share with their teams at some stage. An information sharing meeting might include presentations from stakeholders or sub-teams, keynote speeches, company updates or briefings for new staff. Subtypes of this meeting might include the company all-hands, training sessions, external parties delivering presentations, product demonstrations, and more. While some items can be distributed via email, there is power and value in sharing information in a live, public setting where you can clarify any points of confusion and highlight your key points. Remember that information-sharing meetings do not need to be wholly passive. As a team leader, you should consider where you can use activities and games to ensure engagement.

Decision making meetings

Team meetings that bring people together to focus on a common goal are great places to make decisions and solve problems. A decision making meeting can vary from information gathering and sharing, coming together to evaluate solutions, voting on a course of action, or aligning around the implementation of a chosen decision. In this kind of meeting, clearly setting the purpose and desired outcome is integral to its success. If you want to come out of the meeting with a decision made, set this expectation prior to the meeting taking place. It’s also important to ensure that everyone involved in the decision is considered and that their views are heard. Group decision-making meetings with a clear leader are an effective way to pool resources but also ensure action is taken.

Problem solving meetings

All teams face problems both big and small. These might relate to business challenges, internal politics, external pressures or particular projects or team goals.

A problem solving meeting can be a great place to employ out-of-the-box techniques and exercises , consider problems from new angles, and create change in an organization. Your problem solving meeting might even be focused on first clearly identifying and defining a problem with data, or creating a strategy to deal with problems that you expect may arise. Proactive problem solving is a great way to engage your team and delight your customers .

Innovation meetings

The design and innovation meeting is where your team can be creative, bringing new ideas to the table that can help drive innovation in your organization . Here, your team might conduct workshops, design sprints, and ideation games to generate innovation before moving on to finessing and honing those ideas into something more concrete. Though they might be looser in nature, innovation and ideation meetings should always have goals and outcomes in mind and be focused on creating actionable items you might iterate on in the future.

Check out the ideation workshop template to see how you might schedule and run this kind of meeting effectively.

Team building meetings

Every meeting you run with your team should be an opportunity for collaboration, discussion, and conversation : all items that contribute to building a strong and effective team. That being said, dedicated team building meetings are vital to building a vibrant company culture, bringing a team together, and to help keep everyone happy and productive. You might go on a company away day, facilitate conversation between previously siloed teams, celebrate your team’s successes, engage in activities and exercises, and unify your staff.

Check out the team canvas template agenda for a great example of how you might spend time on creating better team cohesion in an upcoming meeting!

It’s really important that meeting participants have clarity on the ’type’ of meeting they are attending. Too often people think they are there to make decisions when it’s not even a decision making meeting! Be explicit before and during, especially at the start to the meeting, whether it’s an info share, problem solving or decision making meeting and if it IS a decision making meeting what decision making strategy and tool/method will be used to decide!” Gary Austin , Co-Founder & Director, circleindigo IAF Global Director of Communications

Team meetings are incredibly important to a productive team and organisation. Ensuring that all the members of a team are given what they need to perform well, remain aligned and be happy and effective in their work is vital, and meetings remain one of the most efficient ways to facilitate teaching, conversation and change . 

In large organizations with many teams, there comes the danger of siloing teams or individuals away from the rest of the company. Communication between teams is integral to helping everyone understand business goals and company direction, all with the goal of promoting better collaboration and to prevent friction or frustration.

In a Fierce, Inc survey on team collaboration , they found that “ 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures .” Well-constructed team meetings promote collaboration and communication and can ensure that any difficulties that might lead to the above failure can be addressed before it occurs.

Consider whether members of your product team have regular contact with your support or success teams. Meetings that reach across teams and pull people who might not work closely together is a great way of sharing ideas and knowledge and ensuring that work done will be valuable and not repeated . Product teams can develop better features with the input of customer-facing teams; executive teams can only address staff concerns if they are productively raised and discussed. Team meetings allow this exchange of knowledge and expertise to occur. 

Asynchronous tools to help improve communication, log tasks and collect feedback are great and should be used, though there’s always value in discussing business-critical decisions in person or in remote team meetings. When a group of people get together in a room on virtually, you are able to iterate quickly, develop ideas and be agile. There is always value in putting your team in a safe, non-hierarchical space to discuss ideas .

The best teams communicate often and reappraise their goals, methods, and outcomes regularly. A good team meeting can be the most effective way to accomplish this, though a bad team can set your team back and even ruin morale. So how can you improve your team meeting and avoid time-wasting? Read on to see how planning, agendas, and good practice can make your team meeting more effective. 

Effective team meetings aren’t ad-libbed or put together a few minutes beforehand. Planning the structure, purpose, and scope of your meeting not only helps you understand the value it can provide but also helps you keep everything on track. Here are some tips on how to plan an effective team meeting.

Ask whether this needs to be a meeting

Before you schedule a meeting, ask yourself whether what you aim to achieve or discuss needs to be done in a meeting. Can the aims of the meeting be better accomplished with collaborative online tools or via other methods? Meetings without value or purpose can frustrate your staff or divert attention from business-critical items.

Every meeting should have a clear purpose and outcome in mind , whether that’s to generate ideas, teach the use of a new tool, or to eat birthday cake. If you do not have a purpose or outcome for your meeting, reassess whether it is a good use of your team’s time.

Remember that giving your staff an open forum to air concerns or to take some downtime and get to know one another does have value. So long as the meeting is the most efficient way of reaching a particular outcome, even if that outcome is an open conversation or simply having fun, it deserves to be run.

Clarify the purpose and expected outcomes of the meeting

Team meetings can be fluid in nature: certain topics may generate large amounts of discussion while others may be straightforward. The key to a successful meeting is to be clear on the purpose of the meeting and what outcomes you and the team should expect as a result. Clarify this early on in the planning process so that you can ensure your meeting is on point and so that everything you design for the meeting is relevant.

Create a team meeting agenda and prioritize your topics

Start by creating an agenda for your meeting, including all the topics you want to cover. Have a clear idea of what items in your agenda are most important so you can adjust accordingly, keep things on track, and allow for further discussion if necessary. Prioritize your topics so you can ensure that what needs to be covered is done so without issue, and so that any time in the meeting is well spent.

Being in control does not mean being inflexible : as a team leader, you should have a feel for what is most valuable to your team and this means ensuring that happens, but that you are able to adapt to what comes up in the meeting.

Collaborate with other stakeholders

90% of employees in the Fierce Inc survey believed decision-makers should seek other opinions before making a final decision . 97% of people also believed that a lack of alignment within a team directly impacted the outcome of a project . This is true for meetings as much as any other organizational process. Seeking the opinions and input of others and aligning ahead of meetings through collaboration is vital to making your meetings more effective. Ensure stakeholders from other departments have a channel to raise items for discussion. Use the expertise and insight of your team to deliver better meetings. If you’re briefing your executive team on product developments, get input from your product team and, if possible, get them in the room to lead the relevant sections. Team meetings are places to build bridges, whether that be between gaps in knowledge or between team members – help build those bridges by putting the right people in the room together. Be certain to judge how much collaboration is necessary for your meeting. A large-scale meeting about the direction of a company should have feedback and input from many divisions; a small group meeting about how to use a specialized piece of equipment, possibly not. It’s worth noting that facilitating collaboration with the right tools and processes is vital to make this work. Using emails to collect meeting ideas, collaborate on sessions and develop plans is likely to be inefficient and lead to things being lost in the cracks.

Tailor the agenda and format to suit the purpose of the meeting

A team meeting intended to finalize a decision-making process will need a mix of methods and techniques very different to a daily stand-up meeting. One size does not fit all and your meeting should be explicitly constructed with the purpose in mind . This might mean including icebreaker games if the purpose of the meeting is team building, or including design and innovation techniques for an ideation workshop . Your agenda may need amending if the meeting is for senior stakeholders versus the whole team. An open forum might benefit an informal discussion but you may need to employ a different model when leading a business-critical meeting that needs to be delivered quickly. Design your meeting to suit its purpose, the allocated time, and participants, and it will be much more productive as a result.

Be wary of fatigue

Some meetings are longer than others by necessity, though you should always consider the effect this will have on your participants. Allocate breaks preferably at least every 90 minutes, if not sooner. 

If you have particularly dense items to go through, consider how you might make them more engaging or easy to understand. Multiple formats for presenting information can help – mixing collaborative exercises and more discursive teaching can be a good way of keeping people engaged and avoiding fatigue.

Design your meeting with the attendees in mind

A small team meeting with your HR department will require a different approach to a company all-hands with dozens of attendees. You may need to adjust timings, put in additional items or construct your meeting differently. If you’re discussing development roadmaps with a team with varying levels of technical knowledge, consider the language used and whether you might want to circulate FAQs or explainers ahead of the meeting. When including facilitation methods, exercises or games, bear in mind the number of attendees and whether you might need breakout groups. A team-building exercise with dozens of attendees could take the entire meeting if not handled correctly. Remember: this will likely not be the first or last meeting people will have attended. If you are leading a meeting for design professionals, many techniques or methods will already be known to them and you should plan accordingly. Different skill and experience levels require different approaches and as such, you should know who will be attending ahead of the meeting. Design your sessions so that they are engaging and useful for everyone.

Know your audience and be humble in recognising that a burning subject for you may not be uppermost in the minds of the team! Once you balance that in your preparation – approach the meeting accordingly to get the best out of everyone and to meet your own needs. Jane Mitchell , Founder JL&M, Director at Karian and Box

Carefully select who needs to attend

If your meeting is for stakeholders in a particular topic or is focusing on a particular product area, it may not be pertinent for everyone in your company to attend. Think about who will find it valuable, who it affects and who has something to contribute. Always go back to your purpose and outcomes and if some people aren’t going to find value in attending, rethink whether they should attend. Frustration can arise if people are in meetings they have no reason to be in or where they have nothing to learn or add.

Consider the location and plan ahead

Are you using powerpoint or conducting a software demo? Do you want people to be able to break out into smaller teams? Ensuring you have the right location, room setup and resources for your meeting will keep your meeting on time and effective. Think about accessibility and the needs of all the members of your team when choosing a location and design your meeting accordingly.

Circulate your agenda ahead of the meeting

Giving your team time to prepare and arrive at the meeting with an idea of what they’d like to bring is imperative in ensuring a productive meeting. Some topics are complex and benefit from forethought – by circulating the team meeting agenda in advance, participants can get a headstart and feel prepared.

Give your participants clear expectations of the meeting

When circulating your agenda, ensure you give your staff an outline of what is expected of them . If they need to prepare material, be clear about what they need to prepare and exactly what you want from them. Are they bringing an idea they can present in thirty seconds or something more robust? Do they need to bring any equipment or materials? Do you need them to review a document or product prior to attending? At the planning stage, itemize everything your participants will need to bring to the meeting or tasks they will need to do before. With this clarity, both you and your participants can thoroughly prepare and the meeting can run more efficiently. At this stage, it can also be useful to set the ground rules for the team meeting. This might include delineating leaders, expected etiquette, attendance and more. This is likely to be reiterated in the meeting, but giving your participants an expectation of behavior and how the meeting will be conducted at this stage can help prevent future issues from arising.

Create room in your meeting for discussion

Realistically allot time to tasks and, depending on the meeting format, allow time for questions and feedback. It’s sometimes tempting to cram topics and exercises into a meeting and try and rush through everything. Ensure your workload and agenda is sensibly timed , and that you have some wiggle room if a task generates additional discussion or needs further explanation. If the subject of the meeting is likely to create a discussion among your team, it can be incredibly frustrating to cut that short.

Set a schedule and stick to it where possible

Having a consistent time and schedule for your team meetings is tremendously useful. Setting a routine is great at ensuring your staff will remember to attend and get into a habit of checking the agenda and doing preparatory work. 

People like to know what’s coming and scheduling your meetings on the hoof can lead to frustration. Set a schedule so your staff can plan around their work around the meeting and be at their most productive.

Expect equipment to fail and plan ahead

Technical solutions and audio-visual equipment can enrich any meeting, though what happens if something goes wrong? Can you afford to cancel a meeting because the sound refuses to come out of the speakers or your magic pointer is out of battery? Plan for the event of a tech failure so you can deliver a productive, effective meeting whatever the circumstances. This might mean bringing printouts, having back-up materials, or alternative ideation exercises. 

Extra considerations for virtual team meetings

Before you jump into a video call, there are a few more things you’ll want to think about in order to make the session a success.

Does everyone have access to the video app or the meeting link? Use google calendar or similar to ensure everyone can see the meeting and attend. Reminders in Slack or calendar software are also useful to ensure everyone gets into the meeting on time. 

Remember to consider timezones when selecting a time for a remote meeting . Your US team might not appreciate a team meeting at midnight in their timezone!

Should the meeting be recorded for other members of staff who may not be online can gain benefits? If so, how will that be done? Doing things last minute or finding out how to record during the meeting isn’t the best use of time – plan ahead so that your meeting runs smoothly.

Be sure to make it clear at the outset whether you want people to respond in chat, or by speaking up. This can ensure everyone feels able to contribute while also keeping your video call on time!

Lastly, you might want to consider the tools you’re using for your virtual team meeting. Combining the best collaboration tool with your video software of choice can massively impact the success of your session. Take a peek at our collection of free online tools to get started!

Setting a clear agenda can be one of the most effective ways of ensuring your meeting is a success. Creating a team meeting agenda that covers expectations, how everyone should prepare, and including the complete rundown of the meeting should be your first port of call when putting your meeting together. 

In short, your team meeting agenda is a tool to outline what will be included in your team meeting, including topics, times, and additional material. It is an overview that you and your staff can refer to ahead of and during the meeting. 

Want to get started with a complete example agenda? Check out our collection of meeting and workshop templates to get inspired and see a schedule in action.

An example team meeting agenda might include:

Meeting details: time, location, and host

News and announcements, progress report or follow-up on a previous meeting, future actions.

Make sure your team knows when and where the meeting is, and who will be leading it. Add contact details if necessary so participants can forward questions ahead of the meeting. The details or introduction of your agenda should also include goals and expected outcomes, what the purpose of the meeting it, and what do you want your team to get out of it. Having a clear goal and letting your team know what you hope to achieve can really help make a meeting more productive.

Don’t assume that everyone on your team reads every email announcement. Here, you can highlight key bits of news, share announcements, and give kudos to team members who deserve extra recognition. Beginning a meeting in this manner helps staff settle in and warm up before the real work of the meeting kicks off.

Was an item raised in the previous meeting that needs to be checked in on? Was a business-critical action agreed on that requires a debrief or status update?  If the subject of a series of team meetings is a particular project or initiative, you might discuss what progress has been made, what the next steps are and what obstacles exist. This portion of a meeting is intended to align and resolve any issues swiftly so that everyone can be productive once the meeting is over.

This is often where the bulk of meeting time is spent. The team leader or other stakeholders will explore the topics of the meeting with the group and lead them towards the desired outcome. This might include the teaching of a new product feature by a lead developer, a discussion of employee benefits, or workshops or exercises designed with a specific goal in mind. 

The format of this section will be tailored to the needs of the meeting and should be focused on fulfilling the purpose and goals of the meeting. If your meeting is designed to generate new ideas, this will be where you create space for exercises and group work. If there is business-critical information your team needs to receive, the approach you take might be more discursive. The important thing is that you go through the key items of your agenda in an efficient, productive manner. Outlining the key topics that will be covered in your agenda helps you do this in a cinch.

Opening the floor to your team and allowing room for them to feedback on the contents of the meeting or to raise other concerns is an important element of most team meetings. As a manager, creating space to listen to your team and encourage open, honest discussion is one of the most empowering things you can do for your staff.  It’s worth noting that there are many ways to facilitate discussion in a team meeting: you may have a plenary discussion, roundtables, town hall-style, note-and-vote, small group breakouts or an open forum. Tailor the form of discussion to your group size and the purpose of the meeting. Many meetings will allow time and space for discussion throughout, but having dedicated time towards the end of a meeting can allow your staff the opportunity to plan ahead and bring concerns that will benefit from group discussion to the table. 

Here is where you will wrap up the outcomes of the meeting and agree on actions to be taken as a result of what has been discussed. These might include follow-ups with particular staff members, new tasks, or items to be actioned ahead of the next meeting. Just as you set clear expectations of what you wanted from your team prior to the meeting, this is a place to set the expectations you have of staff following the meeting.

This list is by no means exhaustive and will be tailored to your meeting. If the focus of your team meeting is to discuss a business-critical issue, you may not have need for other news and announcements. If you having a team-building meeting, you may want to avoid more formal topics in your agenda. Remember: your agenda sets the stage for your meeting and affects what expectations people will have as a result. Your agenda will let your staff whether they are going into a meeting where they will be primarily taught, whether they need to prepare for group discussions, or if its a looser team development meeting.

So you’ve created an awesome team meeting agenda, planned everything down to the finest detail, and gotten everyone into the right place. How do you lead a meeting and ensure it is productive for everyone involved?

Conducting a team meeting effectively is an important skillset and is an often neglected area of managerial duty . The best meeting agenda can fall apart if a meeting is allowed to go off the rails. Here are some tips on what to do before the meeting, during the meeting, and afterward.

• Before the meeting
• During the meeting
• After the meeting

What to do before your team meeting

Preparation and planning is key to a successful team meeting. Here are some tips on what you can do before your meeting that will help it be more productive.

Be familiar with the equipment and meeting location

Are you using a projector to display materials or running a product demo? Check your equipment and set-up beforehand so that the meeting can run smoothly. Acts of gods can happen, but prepare for eventualities where equipment may fail. If you’re booking an unfamiliar meeting room, arrive early or scope it out beforehand. Are there enough chairs? Allow yourself time to set-up the room before it begins. Time spent arranging a room during a meeting will cut into your agenda time.

Allow sufficient time for prep

Giving your team the time to properly prepare for the meeting is integral to ensuring it is a success. If they have materials to prepare or read through, ensure that everyone has time to go through them. Sending a document last minute and expecting everyone to receive and digest it is likely to cause issues. On the flip side, ensure you have time to prep yourself. Getting to a staff meeting late and having to set-up in a hurry can mean your meeting sets off on the wrong foot. Giving yourself time to mentally prepare, particularly if the subject of a meeting is business critical or emotive is also important. Have time to take a breath, set-up the room and go over your agenda before you start.

Keep it lean

A team meeting is just one small part of the working day and productive teams will have other tasks they need to attend to. Keep your meetings lean and cut out extraneous items so they can be all killer, no filler. Tight, well-designed meetings are more engaging and will save time too!

Remember that time for questions and discussion is vital and should not be the first thing on the chopping block. You are the expert in what your team needs and what is of greatest value to them. Design with that in mind and your meetings will be more effective as a result. 

Be clear about the purpose and scope of the meeting

Not being clear can allow a meeting to be derailed or to focus on non-vital areas for too long. Always bear in mind the purpose of the meeting and adjust when something goes off track if it is not of value.

There is a fine line to tread between being rigid and flexible but any tension can be mitigated by being clear both before and during a meeting. Being clear about the scope of the meeting is also important: no single meeting can cover everything happening in a company and it’s important to know what can be accomplished in the time you have allocated. 

What to do during your team meeting

Once the meeting has begun, there are a number of things you will want to keep an eye on so that it is valuable and engaging for all involved. Here are a few things you can do to make your staff meeting a success.

Set the ground rules

This can make the difference between a productive meeting where everyone feels heard, and a meeting where people become angry and lose interest. The ground rules for a meeting might take the form of a quick word on how people can raise items, how they should interact with other members and what is expected of them or can become as exhaustive as a contract that attendees agree to. You should be clear about what is expected of your participants and also, what is unacceptable behavior. Becoming aggressive, shouting over other attendees or not engaging with the group are all things you might want to guard against by setting out the rules before you begin. 

Effective team meetings are based on respect, trust, and communication: your ground rules should lay down the importance of these items so your attendees can operate in the knowledge they will be heard and respected in the meeting.

Watch the clock

Keep your eye on the clock and ensure your meeting runs on time. This might mean wrapping up certain discussions early or allowing others to continue. You need to judge the value of what’s being discussed but broadly speaking, stick to your agenda and keep to your timings so that everything is covered. 

Ensure that there is a clear meeting leader

Even when bringing in other parties, there should be a person in the room responsible for timekeeping, leading and curating the meeting. This will ensure that if things get out of hand there is one person to defer to and make judgment calls for when to move on. This does not mean that meetings should be run dictatorially – it is simply important to have someone in control of the flow of the meeting and to redirect energies where necessary.

Model the behavior you want to see

Remember that as a leader you are modeling the behavior you want to see in your staff. If you do not appear that you want to be in the meeting, your team will pick up on that. Be positive and engaged, listen to your team and collaborate where possible and set the example for meeting behavior your team can follow.

Share responsibilities 

Trying to do everything as the leader of a team meeting is valiant but may not result in the most effective or enjoyable meeting. Collaborate before the meeting by getting input from stakeholders and domain experts. Share tasks if applicable and leverage the expertise of your team. This might mean having chosen attendees leading particular sections of the meeting, having a designated note-taker or person responsible for tech. If your focus is on facilitating the meeting most effectively, be empowered by sharing other tasks with members of your team.

Be flexible to business conditions

Try starting every meeting with a quick review of the agenda and of the parameters of the meeting. Is something business-critical occurring, or have some of the items to be covered drastically changed since the agenda was circulated? Business is fluid and as the leader of a team meeting, you should be flexible when judging if the meeting needs to change or be abandoned.

Be engaging

If you are delivering training, there are many ways you can transmit information more effectively and by engaging your team in fresh ways. A meeting should not be a one-way conversation and by trying proven techniques of increasing engagement, you can have more productive meetings.  You might include some exercises or activities to get your team to energized or think of problems in new ways. Remember that changing things for the sake of changing them can also lead to frustration. Not every kind of meeting needs an energizer or ice breaker. You are the expert on your team, and you should judge the tenor and make-up of the meeting accordingly. 

Consider inclusion and engagement and help everyone feel of equal value in the room – that they are valued for who they are. This means making the meeting accessible physically, but also socially/psychologically – e.g. the language used, waiting at least 7 seconds for people to respond to a question, using people’s names to invite them into a discussion. Remember that people “engage” in different ways – some speak up, others process thoughts quietly. Just “showing up” can be a form of engagement.  Laura Sly , Trainer, Facilitator, Coach, Consultant; YLS Ltd

Encourage participation by creating the right environment

When facilitating a team meeting, participation is one of your key measures of success. Creating space in your agenda for people to participate and contribute is important. Create a safe space where people feel they can participate without judgment. Set your expectations when it comes to participation and outline the ground rules so that everyone gets a chance to speak. Some team members are likely to be chattier than others: stay alert and encourage your less forthcoming team members to speak up. Ensuring that everyone feels heard and empowered to contribute leads to a greater range of input and helps build a safe environment for sharing. 

Encourage honesty and openness

All teams may disagree on certain points, whether it comes to direction, focus or strategy. Build an environment where your staff can be honest, candid and direct in team meetings. Encouraging your staff that honesty and candidness is not only encouraged but celebrated can help accelerate any process and ensure that every staff member can speak their mind. While there will always be a meeting leader, make it clear that everyone’s opinion is valuable, whether they are part of the executive team or a junior member who just joined the organization.

Take notes, minutes or record the meeting

Have you ever lead a great team meeting only to forget what the takeaways were as soon as you’ve left the room? Genius can strike in the moment and be lost just as quickly. Have a method in place for recording the meeting or taking notes. If you are leading a meeting, this might be conducted by another team member. For remote teams, this might be recording the video of the meeting or can be just as simple as having a notepad at the ready. Recording the meeting also means you have resources to learn from in the future and improve your meetings if something didn’t go well.

Make reviewing meetings part of the routine, something you do at the end of every meeting, so that everyone is learning how to do it better all the time. Three simple questions: to what extent did we meet our aims in this meeting? What helped? What got in the way? Give everyone a chance to say something and put the responses in the note of the meeting so you remember to make improvements next time. Penny Walker , Facilitator, Trainer, Coach, Consultant for sustainable development

What to do after your team meeting

Most team meetings will result in actions being agreed upon and further steps your staff will need to take. Be sure to continue the work done during the meeting with the following tips on what to do once the meeting is over.

Be sure to allow time for feedback both inside and outside of the meeting. This might be in a slack room, a google poll or an email after the meeting, but hearing from the attendees on what worked and what didn’t can be instrumental in ensuring the value of future meetings. 

Some questions you might ask can include:

• Were you given enough time/resources to prepare for the meeting?
• How did the meeting deliver value and meet your expectations?
• What would you have added to the agenda? 

Listen to your team

What do they need from your meetings and how can you deliver better value to them? This might come up during open discussions in your meeting, though its key to allow other forums for your team to raise these items without the scrutiny of speaking in front of everyone. You may even consider allowing anonymous feedback with a form or survey if the topics of discussion would benefit from anonymity. What’s important is that every member of staff can give feedback and have their voice heard in the way that is best for them.

Demonstrate value

Demonstrate the value of your meetings to your teams and stakeholders throughout the organization. Did your team meeting expose a customer pain point or result in a great new product idea? Were you able to solve a problem as a team that can benefit the whole organization? If your team is one part of a greater whole, share best practices and your findings. If you can prove your team meetings generate results, staff will likely be more engaged in future meetings.

Running better team meetings that engage your staff and increase productivity is not an exact science. Use the tips above but be sure to trust your instincts and tailor your approach to your team. 

Running a successful team meeting is an alchemy of planning, facilitation, great exercises, and engaging content. Is there something we didn’t cover above but is on your mind? We highlighted some of the most commonly asked questions about team meetings below for you!

What are the benefits of team meetings?

Is there such thing as too many team meetings, is the traditional team meeting dead, how do i make team meetings more fun, how should i start a team meeting, what should i do in my first team meeting, what are team meetings best used for.

When you bring your team together effectively, something magic happens. You can create a sense of energy and shared purpose, clean up misconceptions and remove blockers too. The best team meetings enable great work to happen without taking up too much time or frustrating participants.

It takes effort, planning, and good facilitation skills , but the benefits of a team meeting include:

• improved team cohesion and alignment
• clear designation of tasks and next steps
• removal of blockers and challenges
• celebration of wins and accomplishments
• space to brainstorm and ideate together
• keep the team informed of developments and upcoming items
• team bonding and connection
• opportunity to practice presentation skills
• time to give feedback and improve team processes

Yes and no. It’s true that many organizations have too many unproductive or dull meetings, but it’s also true that we still need good meetings in order to create high-functioning and connected teams.

Any manager running meetings should have a clear idea of the purpose and benefits of the meeting. If the meeting has no value or purpose, you should really question whether the meeting needs to go ahead at all. If you are running multiple team meetings, consider whether they can be condensed, made leaner or whether some of them can be replaced with collaborative online tools. Meeting fatigue is very real and burning your team out on an excessive number of meetings can only reduce productivity. 

No. Teams will always need to meet and discuss business items and, where possible, meeting in person is still hugely valuable. Creating engaging meetings with purpose and fresh approaches to engaging staff will help your team meetings be something your staff look forward to, rather than dread.

Slack channels and collaboration tools are great but do not discount the value of a well-planned and properly run team meeting where people can collaborate face-to-face.

Fun is a tricky concept when it comes to team meetings. Does every meeting need to be fun, and should a meeting’s value be judged on whether it is fun or not? Perhaps a better question would be: How do I make a team meeting more engaging? In a business-critical meeting where high-level items are being discussed, you do not necessarily need people to have fun, but to be engaged with the subject of the meeting and have clear takeaways and actions. In a team development meeting designed to get teams talking, fun should absolutely be a consideration. Use energizers, exercises and proven methods of engagement from our library to help people connect, build bridges and have fun. Every meeting should be the best version of itself it can be: if it’s a meeting where people are getting to know each other, make it more fun and include some energizers . If it’s a meeting where you are trying to improve collaboration between staff, make it more collaborative.

By focusing on making your meeting more engaging, your meeting will be more successful: successful teams inevitably have more fun. Create a positive feedback loop!

Warming up your staff ahead of complicated or emotive discussion is a great idea. This might include an icebreaker activity , the sharing of good news or announcements, or a quick debate on a small issue. Encouraging the activity you’d like to see in the meeting in a fun, brief form is a good way to ensure staff are warmed up and ready to engage with the rest of the meeting. Engage people with open questions to invite them into the meeting, set the tone, be positive, and make lots of eye contact. Remember you are modeling the behavior you want to see from your participants, and by making a great example, people can follow suit.

When you are leading your first team meeting, whether with an entirely new team or in a new role, you are setting the tone for future meetings and interactions with your team. Lead a poorly planned and executed meeting and you are teaching your team to dread your future meetings. Make a big impact by finessing your first meeting and creating a template for future success.

In your first team meeting, ensure you have ample time to get to know everyone, break the ice and have open, frank discussions. After your first team meeting, give your team the chance to offer feedback and help you improve – creating an environment of honest, unilateral feedback will pay dividends in future meetings.

Team meetings are great places to resolve issues and confusion with honest, open discussion. Items that might take dozens of back and forth emails to clarify can be talked through in a safe public forum and you can save time as a result. In many organizations, team meetings might be the only time you can get the right minds all together in a room for a single purpose. The collaborative atmosphere is great for developing ideas, problem-solving and fast iteration. Bouncing thoughts off one another in a meeting environment can be extremely effective and lead to unexpected outcomes. Team meetings are also best used for transmitting critical information in a way you know your staff will receive. Emails can be missed or items in a bulletin can be skipped. In a team meeting you can ensure everyone is on the same page and that any concerns and raised.

In conclusion

We hope we’ve given you some insight into how to lead a better team meeting and get the most out of the time you spend in meetings. Whether you run a team meeting once a week or every three months, taking the time to plan, collaborate and consider how to make your meeting more engaging is an integral part of managing and leading a team.

If we’ve left anything out or if you have questions about any part of the post, write to us in the comments below. We’d love to hear how you connect with staff in team meetings and your tips to lead the best team meeting possible!

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Staff meeting presentation: A comprehensive guide

Learn how to write staff meeting presentations that engage and inform your team, with this comprehensive guide.

Raja Bothra

Building presentations

Hello fellow presenter!

Welcome to the world of staff meetings and presentations!

In today's fast-paced business environment, effective communication and collaboration are paramount.

One of the essential tools in your arsenal for achieving this is a staff meeting presentation.

But what exactly is a staff meeting presentation, and why is it so important?

What is a staff meeting?

A staff meeting is a regular gathering of team members, stakeholders, or coworkers within an organization to discuss, update, and collaborate on various topics. These meetings play a crucial role in keeping everyone on the same page and moving towards common goals.

Why is a staff meeting presentation important?

Think of a staff meeting presentation as the secret ingredient that elevates your gathering from the mundane to the extraordinary. It's the moment when you seize the stage to captivate your audience, disseminate vital information, and ignite the spark of action. A well-structured presentation has the magical power to transform an ordinary meeting into a powerhouse of productivity and engagement.

But why is it so crucial? Here's the scoop: A staff meeting presentation is your compass for steering your team in the right direction. It aligns everyone on those paramount goals and objectives, ensuring that every team member knows precisely what they should be working toward. Picture it as the lighthouse guiding the ship through the stormy seas of tasks and projects, showing how each individual's efforts fit into the grand scheme of things.

Moreover, staff meeting presentations are your megaphone for sharing the latest news, vital updates, and key announcements. It's like having a front-row seat to the latest developments in your organization. And remember, a well-informed team is an empowered team.

But it doesn't stop there. These presentations are also your tool for gathering invaluable feedback and insights from your team. Ever had a brilliant idea for a new policy or product development but needed a second opinion? A presentation can open the floor for discussions, allowing you to harness the collective genius of your team.

Now, let's not forget about the fun side. Staff meeting presentations aren't just about business; they're also an opportunity to build team morale and camaraderie. Imagine it as the team's water cooler chat – but with a purpose. Celebrating successes, acknowledging achievements, and fostering connections are all part of the presentation game.

In a nutshell, a staff meeting presentation is a Swiss Army knife of team dynamics. It's a versatile tool that can significantly enhance communication and collaboration within your team, propelling everyone toward common goals and dreams.

But let's get real and talk specifics. Here are some examples of how a staff meeting presentation can work its magic:

• Sales goals unveiled: Picture a sales manager wielding a presentation to unveil the team's sales goals for the quarter. It's not just numbers and figures; it's the roadmap to success. The presentation also doubles as a strategy brainstorming session, igniting innovative ideas and collaborative spirits.
• Product updates and feedback: In the realm of product management, a presentation is the canvas on which a product manager showcases the latest developments in a new project. But it's not a one-sided show. The team's input on design and features becomes an integral part of the journey, making the final product a collective masterpiece.
• Company vision shared: A CEO, the captain of the ship, can use a presentation to share the company's financial performance, future goals, and grand plans. It's the moment when the entire team gets a panoramic view of where they're headed and how they contribute to the voyage.

Different types of staff meeting presentation

Staff meetings are a commonplace occurrence in the workplace, serving as a vital platform for communication, collaboration, and decision-making among team members and management. These meetings are a crucial element of any organization, allowing teams to synchronize their efforts and work towards common goals. One pivotal component of these meetings is presentations, which play a pivotal role in conveying information, facilitating discussions, and driving progress.

In this guide post, we will delve into various types of staff meeting presentations, each tailored to specific objectives, with the potential to enhance engagement, productivity, and the overall effectiveness of your team gatherings.

• Informational presentations: Informational presentations are the cornerstone of many staff meetings. They are used to convey facts, updates, or data essential for team members to stay informed. Typically, these presentations are straightforward and objective, focusing on providing vital information. Examples include financial reports, project updates, and key performance metrics. To ensure the information is easily understood by all team members, employ clear visuals and concise language.
• Training and development presentations: Training and development presentations are designed to boost the skills and knowledge of your staff. These presentations often cover a wide range of topics, from new software tools to industry trends and best practices. To engage your team and encourage active learning, consider incorporating interactive elements, such as quizzes or hands-on demonstrations.
• Problem-solving presentations: When the team encounters a specific challenge or issue, problem-solving presentations become invaluable. During these meetings, presenters define the problem, gather input from team members, and collaboratively brainstorm potential solutions. The primary goal is to find effective resolutions or strategies to address the issue at hand, fostering problem-solving skills and team cohesion.
• Project status updates: For teams engaged in various projects, project status updates are a must. These presentations offer a comprehensive view of the project's progress, highlighting milestones achieved, potential roadblocks, and upcoming tasks. Visual aids like Gantt charts and timelines can make project updates more engaging and informative, enabling teams to align their efforts effectively.
• Team building and motivational presentations: Team building and motivational presentations aim to boost team morale, enhance collaboration, and promote a positive work culture. These presentations often feature success stories, team accomplishments, and the recognition of outstanding employees. Encouraging participation and feedback can make team members feel valued, appreciated, and inspired to excel.
• Innovation and ideation sessions: Innovation and ideation sessions stimulate creative thinking and problem-solving. These presentations may involve brainstorming sessions or design thinking activities, encouraging team members to think beyond the conventional boundaries, propose novel ideas, and explore potential innovations within the organization.
• Departmental showcases: In larger organizations, departmental showcases provide individual teams or departments with the opportunity to shine a spotlight on their achievements, share best practices, and discuss their goals and challenges. These presentations promote transparency, cross-departmental understanding, and the sharing of valuable insights.

There are various types of staff meeting presentations, each tailored to specific objectives and designed to maximize the impact of your team meetings. The key to success lies in selecting the most appropriate presentation format for your specific meeting's purpose and ensuring that it is well-organized, informative, and engaging. Additionally, it's crucial to customize the presentation to suit the needs and preferences of the audience, ensuring that your staff meetings remain productive and impactful.

How to structure an effective staff meeting presentation

Creating an effective staff meeting presentation involves more than just throwing together a few slides. It's about crafting a compelling narrative that captures your audience's attention and conveys your message effectively. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you structure your presentation:

Step 1: Define your objective: Before you start crafting your presentation, ask yourself, "What is the goal of this meeting?" Your objective will guide the entire presentation, ensuring that every slide and word contributes to the bigger picture.

Step 2: Choose the right meeting template: Selecting the right template is the foundation of your presentation. It determines the layout, format, and overall look and feel of your slides. Whether you prefer powerpoint, google slides, or another format, choose a template that aligns with your message.

Step 3: Create an engaging introduction: Your presentation's introduction is your opportunity to grab your audience's attention. You might use a powerful quote, an intriguing question, or a surprising fact. Remember, the first impression matters.

Step 4: Outline your agenda: Start by providing a clear agenda for the meeting. Use a meeting agenda template to ensure that you cover all the important topics and stay on track.

Step 5: Break it down into stages: For complex topics, consider breaking your presentation into stages or sections. This makes it easier for your audience to digest the information.

Step 6: Visualize your data: Use graphics, icons, and visual aids to make your presentation more engaging and easier to understand. A well-placed graphic can often convey a message more effectively than words alone.

Step 7: Keep it concise: Avoid overwhelming your audience with too much information. Keep your slides and speaking points concise and to the point.

Step 8: Engage your audience: Encourage participation by asking questions, soliciting feedback, and involving your team members. Engaged attendees are more likely to retain and act upon the information presented.

Step 9: Summarize key takeaways: End your presentation with a clear summary of key takeaways and action items. This ensures that everyone leaves the meeting on the same page.

Do's and don'ts of a staff meeting presentation

While knowing what to do is important, it's equally vital to be aware of what to avoid during your staff meeting presentation. Let's explore some do's and don'ts:

• Be prepared : Familiarize yourself with the material and rehearse your presentation.
• Use a meeting template : powerpoint templates make your job easier and ensure a professional look.
• Encourage interaction : Engage your audience by asking questions and involving them in the discussion.
• Stick to the agenda : Stay on topic and respect everyone's time.

Don'ts

• Overwhelm with information : Avoid information overload by keeping your slides concise.
• Go off on tangents : Stick to the agenda and avoid unrelated topics.
• Rush : Speak clearly and at a comfortable pace. Rushing through your presentation can lead to misunderstandings.
• Forget the summary : Always conclude with a summary and action items to provide closure.

Summarizing key takeaways

• Importance of staff meetings and presentations: Staff meetings are essential for team alignment and productivity. Staff meeting presentations drive engagement and information sharing.
• Types of staff meeting presentations: Informational, training, problem-solving, project status, team building, innovation, departmental showcases.
• Creating effective presentations: Define objectives, choose templates, engage with an exciting intro, outline the agenda, use visuals, be concise, encourage participation, summarize key takeaways.
• Do's: Do prepare, use templates, engage the audience, stick to the agenda.
• Don'ts: Don't overwhelm with data, go off-topic, rush, or forget the summary.

Creating a successful staff meeting presentation is an art. It requires careful planning, the right tools, and the ability to engage your audience effectively. Whether you're using powerpoint, google slides, or another format, the key to success is in the details. Remember to choose a suitable template, structure your presentation well, and keep your audience engaged.

1. How can I prepare a staff meeting presentation without starting from scratch?

If you want to avoid the time-consuming task of creating a powerpoint presentation ppt from scratch, consider using a meeting powerpoint template. These templates are pre-designed, editable, and customizable, which makes it easier for you to refine the results. You can download a free team meeting powerpoint template to get started.

2. What elements should I include in my staff meeting presentation to make it a great presentation?

To create a great presentation, ensure that your meeting powerpoint includes an agenda slide, agenda items, and clear sections or stages to make your message flow smoothly. You can also add graphic elements in the slide to enhance visibility and engage your audience effectively.

3. How can I keep track of our weekly staff meetings and the information discussed during them?

One way to keep track of your weekly staff meetings is by creating meeting minutes. These documents help you record all the important details and decisions made during the meeting. You can use a powerpoint presentation to create meeting slides and include placeholders for meeting minutes.

4. Where can I find powerpoint templates specifically designed for team meetings?

If you're looking for team meeting powerpoint templates, you can try searching for them on Microsoft's website or use free google slides templates available online. These templates are categorized according to the number of divisions or graphic elements you want in your slides. You can select a 4 piece puzzle slide or any other graphic that suits your needs.

5. How can I efficiently plan my monthly staff meeting presentation and make it more engaging for my team?

To efficiently plan your monthly staff meeting presentation, you can start by using a meeting presentation template. This template includes everything you need, such as editable slides and graphics, to make your meetings more interactive. By using a template, you can easily customize your presentation for each monthly meeting and ensure your next presentation runs smoothly.

Create your staff meeting presentation with prezent

Prezent offers a comprehensive solution for creating staff meeting presentations that can greatly enhance your communication within the company. Here are some ways in which Prezent can help you in this regard:

• Brand consistency : Prezent ensures that your staff meeting presentations are always on-brand. With brand-approved design templates and guidelines, you can maintain a consistent and professional image throughout your presentations, reinforcing your corporate identity.
• Time efficiency : With Prezent's AI presentation tool, you can save valuable time. It streamlines the presentation creation process, reducing the time and effort required to prepare engaging content for your staff meetings.
• Audience personalization : Prezent's personalized fingerprints allow you to tailor your staff meeting presentations to the preferences of your audience. This ensures that the content is relevant and engaging for your specific team, enhancing their understanding and retention.
• Collaboration and real-time sharing : Prezent offers real-time collaboration features, enabling your team to work together on the presentation, even if they are located remotely. This fosters a sense of unity and ensures that all team members contribute their insights.
• Cost savings : By using Prezent, you can cut down on communication costs significantly. This means you can allocate resources more effectively within your organization, potentially reinvesting the saved funds into other essential areas.
• Security : Prezent places a high emphasis on data security. Your sensitive information is protected through enterprise-grade security measures, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of your staff meeting presentations.
• Professional services : If you're looking for a personal touch, Prezent offers professional services, such as Overnight Services and Presentation Specialists. These services can help you further refine and enhance your staff meeting presentations to make a lasting impact.

In summary, Prezent is a valuable platform for creating staff meeting presentations that not only save time and money but also enhance the overall quality and impact of your communication within your organization.

Sign up for our free trial or book a demo today!

Now, go ahead and create compelling staff meeting presentations that leave a lasting impact.

Happy presenting!

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14 creative team meeting ideas to keep employees engaged and motivated

It’s understandable that managers can run out of engaging team meeting ideas at some point. After all, it’s the same type of session, with the same people and often at the same time every day, week or month. 

But team meetings don’t have to be dull and repetitive. In fact, if your meetings are, then you may need to act urgently to get your team’s motivation and engagement back on track.

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In this post, we’ve listed 14 out-of-the-box meeting ideas , from simple and engaging icebreakers to reinventing ways how to run a team meeting. Most of these staff meeting ideas will work equally well for real-life team huddles and virtual team meeting activities.

Take the shortcut to team meeting ideas:

• Start with an icebreaker
• Change location
• Announce a dress code
• Try very short meetings
• Kickoff every meeting with a win
• Do an open mike about work-unrelated stuff
• Brainstorm using sticky notes
• Play “We’re alike”
• Organize casual meeting Fridays
• Assign roles to meeting participants
• Create a PowerPoint presentation
• Establish a meeting ritual
• Try different team meeting topics
• Give small incentives or prizes

1. Start with an icebreaker

Any meeting will be more effective and dynamic if people feel comfortable in it – not only to listen but also to contribute. Ice breakers help people loosen up, opening doors for casual interaction and better engagement. 

An ice breaker doesn’t have to be anything long and complicated. Some examples of fun 5-minute icebreakers:

• Quick questions – ask a few simple but fun questions you’ve prepared in advance, like What’s your favorite ice cream flavor? Where would you like to be right now if you could choose any place in the world? Who was your teenage celebrity crush? 
• Emoji check-in – primarily aimed at remote meetings, this game can also be played out in real life, using sticky notes or a whiteboard. Simply give everyone a minute to choose the most suitable emoji that best fits their mood that day. 
• “No smiling” game – Tell everyone to stare at each other without smiling. The first person to start smiling or laughing is out of the game. The game goes on until there’s only one person left.

Such short games spark funny conversations among colleagues and help to find common interests. For more fun team building games and icebreakers, check out our post about remote team building activities , many of which can also be carried out in a face-to-face setting.  

2. Change location

Do you have a designated meeting room at the office? Or do you always hold meetings in the same corner of your open office? 

Changing the environment can work wonders for employee engagement and creativity. Try going out of your usual meeting room or even out of the building, to the nearest cafe or park. 

If all or part of your team works remotely, give them a challenge to join the meeting from a different part of their house, from the backyard or the nearest coffee shop. Such a tactic has the added benefit of helping your remote team get out of the house and change scenery for a fresh perspective and some exercise. 

Alternatively, you can simply ask that everyone adds a different background on their calling app. Seeing some colleagues on a “beach” during winter months and others in a “disco” is an amusing way to change the vibe of the meeting and spark funny conversation.

3. Announce a dress code

Try spicing up your monthly or weekly team meeting ideas with a different dress code, like the 80s, Halloween, or cartoon characters. A simpler dress code would be to announce “wacky Fridays” when all team members dress in a piece of clothing they have in their wardrobe but never wear. Try this tactic if your team members are up to such goofy fun – it won’t work if only one or two people dress up while others think it’s a silly idea.

Fashion devastation game is an awesome virtual team meeting idea. Ask everyone to turn off the camera for three minutes and wear the funkiest outfit they can find at home. Then, turn on the cameras all at once.

4. Try very short meetings

If your team meetings tend to drag on, try setting a 20, 30 or 45-minute limit and see where it gets you. Experimenting with meeting length creates a different meeting dynamic and structure. When you’re on a time limit, your team is likely to have more productive and focused discussions. 

If you’ve ever worked in an agile project management environment, you’re probably familiar with the concept of standup meetings . Standing up is an effective way to shorten the meetings because people tend to get to the point quicker. An added bonus is that your team will be physically active during the meeting, instead of sitting all day.

5. Kickoff every meeting with a win

Set the tone for your every meeting by announcing a recent accomplishment, noting a top performer in your team or expressing happiness at reaching a milestone. The win doesn’t always have to be a major one – it can be a positive outcome of a client meeting or a task that has been finished. Alternatively, ask your team members to share a personal win they’ve just experienced. 

If you’re looking for ways to make staff meetings more engaging, starting with a win is a pleasant tactic that sets a positive and engaging narrative for the whole session, simultaneously increasing your staff’s motivation. 

Be smart about your time!

Use DeskTime for time management, and always stay on top of your team’s efficiency ratings. 

6. Do an open mike about work-unrelated stuff 

Adding an informal aspect to meetings can foster team camaraderie and boost engagement. Open mike is an especially effective method for weekly or monthly review meetings, which tend to be longer and less hurried. An informal end for the week or month is an excellent way to wind down and finish off on a friendly, less stressful note.

7. Brainstorm using sticky notes

When your team needs to come up with an idea or solve a problem, good old sticky notes can be an effective tactic to get everyone involved – even the colleagues who usually don’t speak up. 

For example, pose a problem and ask everyone to submit possible solutions, even if they sound strange or unrealistic. Give each person a limited amount of sticky notes and ask to fill them all. When time is called, everyone should announce their ideas to others and stick their notes on a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper taped to the wall. The meeting leader should then categorize the notes and name each category. 

For remote teams, you can use online sticky note tools or simply categorize the answers in a Google Sheet that can be accessed by everyone or is shared on the screen. 

8. Play “We’re alike”

Randomly split your (virtual or on-site) team into groups of two to four. Task each group with finding 5 things that its members have in common. When each group has a list, everyone comes together to share and compare what they have. The goal is to find common things among the different groups of people in the company. 

This activity is also an effective icebreaker that helps to get to know each other, especially if some of your team members are shy or introverted. This can also be a powerful way for managers to learn more about their team for future team building activities.  

9. Organize casual meeting Fridays

If your company has a rather corporate culture, your team will enjoy a chance to get casual time after time. Think about introducing casual Fridays where people can wear their comfiest clothes and not worry about being looked down upon.

This concept works equally well for remote teams. Introduce no-camera meeting Fridays to let your team feel as comfortable as possible – even work from the bed if they feel like it. 

10. Assign roles to meeting participants

People will be much more engaged in a meeting if they are expected to contribute in some way. One way to make staff meetings more engaging and get everyone slightly out of their comfort zone is assigning roles to meeting participants. You can choose one of these tactics:

• Appoint a different meeting leader every time . When an employee leads a meeting, they can step in the manager’s shoes and see how it actually works. This tactic not only gives a fresh perspective but also increases empathy within a team.
• Assign several roles and mix and match them every time . For example, you can assign a leader, a time-keeper, a decision-maker and even add different fun roles relevant to your team.

11. Create a PowerPoint presentation

Lately, powerpoints aren’t in fashion, but we all know that some well-forgotten things can feel very fresh when they’re brought back up. Presentations will also be a good way to demonstrate the relevant information in an unusual, engaging and more memorable way.

You can either surprise your team by making an eye-catching PowerPoint yourself or assign this task to a different employee every week or month. Encourage your staff to go creative, use vivid design and fun photos. 

12. Establish a meeting ritual

Rituals allow your employees to take a step back from their immediate work assignments, bond as personalities, or share their views over bigger picture ideas. Rituals also help colleagues build stronger collaboration over time. 

A ritual can be any small activity that encourages positive, rotating communication and sharing accomplishments or insights. It can be something physical, like weekly morning meditation or exercise, or simply stating your thoughts about the previous week or month and sharing your plans for the next one. 

13. Try different team meeting topics

Consider introducing a different theme for every weekly meeting. This can be a work-related team meeting topic like original marketing ideas, new growth directions, team well-being, a better workplace, or something unrelated to work. You can either tailor all the meeting to the specific theme or allocate a part of it to discuss the topic. 

Choosing themes can help avoid your team meetings becoming stagnant or too repetitive. Looking at your shared goals and work environment from a different perspective encourages creativity and opens new doors for dialogue.

If your team is up for fun incentives, do a funny theme every week or month, for example, Hawaii or TV shows. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll need lots of preparation – a few decorations or some fun facts about the meeting theme will give the necessary vibe. As a bonus, you can add a fun-themed game, like a movie trivia quiz or everyone playing Robot Unicorn Attack as part of a Unicorn theme.

14. Give small incentives or prizes

Everyone loves a now and then perk or acknowledgment – a tap on the back that their hard work is noted and appreciated. Also, studies show that a vast majority of employees feel motivated by monetary and non-monetary incentives and that incentives lead to better performance at work.  

Team meetings are a good place and time to surprise your team with muffins, pizza, or gifts for employees as a thank-you for their hard work. Alternatively, you can hold a lottery or a game night with real prizes. Or, award anyone who comes up with the winning idea in a brainstorming session. 

Team huddle ideas for more productive and engaging meetings

Regardless of the size of your team, weekly or monthly staff huddles need a change of scenery time after time. We hope that our list of straightforward and actionable team meeting ideas will be a source of inspiration to reinvent your team sessions and make them more dynamic and productive. 

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Featured content.

• 15 Fun Team Meeting Topics to Engage Your Employees

Rana Bano B2B Content Writer and Strategist

Switch up your work meetings with some exciting, interesting and innovative meeting ideas to break up your normal routine. This list of fun meeting topics will engage and energize your employees, spark creativity and facilitate team building.

Are your meetings becoming a boring snooze-fest?

Workers now spend more time in meetings than ever before, with the number of meetings attended by employees increasing by 12.1%. Unsurprisingly, it's easy to run out of ideas and topics to make it more interesting.

That's not all—recent meetings statistics point out:

• People perceive 71% of meetings as unproductive
• Remote employees multitask in at least 41% of meetings
• 39% of workers have slept off during a work meeting, while at least 91% of employees daydream while meetings are on
• Remote employees spend at least 1-3 hours of virtual meetings weekly, and over 55% think the meetings should have been an email

Even high-performing sales teams report that 17% of salespeople are finding it increasingly hard to stay motivated.

So how can you do things differently? Luckily, there's always room for creativity where you can get your employees' motivation and engagement back on track.

Let's explore 15 fun ideas to make your meetings more awesome and less tiresome.

15 fun ideas and topics for staff meetings at work

1. kickstart every meeting with a win.

Yes! You must set the tone of your meetings right from the beginning. Some good news indeed gladdens the soul and sets the team spirit high. It doesn't always have to be a major win. It could be expressing joy at reaching a milestone, acknowledging a top performer in your team, or announcing a recent accomplishment. Either way, starting with a win is undoubtedly an excellent way of engaging your team and keeping the meeting pleasant, increasing staff motivation.

2. Introduce an icebreaker

Okay, maybe you don't always have a recent win to share at each meeting. How about starting off with an icebreaker? An icebreaker is a good conversation starter that involves getting people to share their stories and experiences.

Usually, this 5-10 minute activity helps the staff know more about one another beyond work-related stuff. It also allows you to take control of your meeting by preventing it from going off-track due to loss of momentum or lack of spirit.

Some fun icebreaker ideas include:

• Quick questions like, what's your favorite ice cream flavor? Two truths and a lie? What's a random fact about yourself?
• A "no smiling" game where everyone stares at each other with a straight face. The first one to smile or laugh is out of the game.
• For remote meetings, you can do an emoji check-in, where everyone chooses the most suitable emoji that best describes their mood that day.

3. Use interactive presentations

Anoher way to keep your meetings fun and engaging is by using interactive presentations.

When you cultivate a habit of having creative, interactive presentations, you encourage your staff to willingly participate in meetings, hold their attention and stay actively engaged.

Here are a few creative interactive presentation ideas worth your time:

• Live polling and quizzes
• Multimedia elements like videos
• Collaborative apps or software
• Gamification elements

4. Brainstorm with sticky notes

When you need to generate ideas to solve a problem, sticky notes can become very handy. The team members will each write down their ideas simultaneously and then explore their different views. This is an effective tactic to get everyone involved, especially those that don't speak up at meetings.

You can brainstorm by posing a problem or presenting an actual issue and then asking each staff member to provide a possible solution, even if they sound unrealistic. Then give each member a sticky note to put down their ideas. When you say "go," the team has 5-10 minutes to write down everything that comes to mind. And when time's up, they can either announce their ideas or stick the notes on a whiteboard where the team leader will arrange each note into named categories.

For remote teams, you can use an online sticky note tool or a Google Sheet to be accessed by everyone.

5. Include competitions

Competitions are another fun idea you can use for your next meeting. But to truly engage employees, gamify them by turning everyday activities into games.

Divide your staff members into groups or pairs and carry out pop quizzes, trivia questions or play mini-charade games. You can award points to each group and even offer them prizes as a reward. These friendly competitions make your meetings engaging and highly entertaining.

6. Change your meeting format

Are your staff members tired of the old, boring, and lecture-type structure of meetings? Then it's time to flick the switch. Changing the format of your meetings helps you prevent monotony and keeps the meeting fresh.

For example, you can transition from a lecture style to a Q&A format. Or ditch the conference table and stuffy room for a "walking meeting." Gather your group, take a stroll and talk.

Another format you can try out is a "workout meeting." This format does the double work of helping your staff exercise while discussing important topics. The workouts should be light, like gentle yoga or casual bike riding, so your workers won't be out of breath and find it hard to communicate.

For virtual meetings, employ the quirkiness of Zoom in your meetings. This can make employee evaluations less stiff and formal and more dynamic. Play around with humorous filters, or decide with your workers to pick a fun place you can set as a backdrop—like the Eiffel tower or Niagara Falls.

7. Add some role-play

What better way to keep your meetings fun and interesting than introducing the idea of role-playing? You can assign some of your employees to act as clients to provide a different perspective. Aside from incorporating fun in your meetings, this role-play will enable you to think and prioritize your client's needs, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction in your organization.

8. Change the meeting topics

To prevent your meetings from becoming too repetitive and stagnant, consider introducing a different theme for each weekly meeting. You can tailor your topics to a specific theme and allow room for topic feedback to let team members choose what they want to discuss. This makes your sessions more interesting and enables you to expand your employees' knowledge beyond what they already know.

9. Share hacks on tools and processes

Apart from making your meetings enjoyable, you can also keep your staff engaged by enriching them with topics that provide value and hold their attention to the end.

Suppose your employees want to learn about effective resource management . You can consider sharing guidelines on internal processes and tools, user onboarding software , tips and tricks for different tools, updates and improvements and common problems to properly educate them on the topic.

Also, you can ask participants to share any hacks or shortcuts they've discovered or provide feedback on a new tool you're considering to implement across the organization.

10. Rotate employees to take the lead

You might feel it's your responsibility to take the lead at every team meeting. But chances are, your staff members are bored listening to you all the time.

Bring a different dynamic to your meetings by delegating the meeting-lead duty to each team member. They'll be more engaged if they're expected to contribute. And not only will this test their leadership skills and provide a new experience for them, but it'll also allow you to explore different perspectives.

11. Invite a guest speaker

Consider bringing in a guest speaker to your staff meetings. This will make your meetings fun and exciting and also help your employees learn a thing or two.

This person could be an industry expert, a business celebrity, a professional connection in your network, or even a customer who can share insights and advice that will impact your employees.

12. Play "Have You Ever"

Another excellent way to build meaningful connections between your remote team is to add a little fun game to your virtual meetings. Have You Ever , for one, is the perfect game to trigger laughs and get everyone to loosen up during staff meetings.

The game is pretty simple—one person asks the group a "Have you ever…" question, and everyone who has done that will hold up their hand in front of the camera. Here are some typical questions:

Have you ever:

• Gone to the bathroom during a conference call
• Faked a bad connection to avoid talking at meetings
• Fallen asleep while others were talking
• Stuffed things under your desk to look like your office was cleaner it was
• Cooked a meal or did laundry while on a call

13. Create your unique meeting tradition

Another exciting way to enhance your meetings is by developing a captivating work tradition. For instance, you can create an end-of-month luncheon, closing chant, pizza meetings, morning meditation exercise, casual dress code day or anything else that will engage your employees actively.

These small activities encourage positive rapport and break bad team communication habits. For remote teams, you can have a no-camera meeting Friday to make your team feel as comfortable as possible or even work from the bed if they feel like it.

14. Keep the meeting flexible

Make your meetings flexible by giving your employees the option to attend certain meetings virtually.

Sometimes, people don't just want to leave their desks and gather in a room for a simple meeting, and this can accommodate your work-from-home team as well. A flexible meeting schedule will enhance your work culture and prevent a toxic work environment .

15. Make time for questions and personal interactions

Allocate time for a brief question and answer at the end of every meeting to ensure your employees understand the crucial points of the meeting. In addition, give room for personal interactions, especially in remote meetings.

This will help employees actively engage each other, thereby boosting their morale.

Final thoughts

Your meetings don't have to be boring—provided you put in the effort to ensure the meetings don't grow stale and cause members to tune out. After all, you want effectiveness and productivity when conducting meetings, right?

Get your meetings back on track by drawing inspiration from this list of fun meeting ideas that lead to more thoughtful discussions, increased engagement and greater productivity.

Access the latest business knowledge in Management

Rana Bano is a one-part B2B content writer and one-part content strategist. She uses these parts to help SaaS brands tell their story, aiming to encourage user engagement and drive traffic.

Join the conversation...

Further Reading

How to Navigate Workplace Politics

The Evolution of Probabilistic Planning

An Employers Guide to Effective Communication in a Crisis

The Quick Guide to Post-Pulse Conversations for Managers

16 Staff Meeting Best Practices (+ Free Staff Meeting Agenda Templates)

Better staff meetings lead to a better workplace for everyone. Learn the best practices for staff meeting and grab FREE agenda templates for productive staff meetings.

Have fewer, more effective meetings with AI, behavior-driving features, and seamless integrations.

Staff meetings should inform and motivate a team, but in an increasingly remote and hybrid workforce, it can be challenging to ensure your team finds them engaging and motivational. The consequences of this can negatively impact your team’s productivity, and they may leave the meeting feeling negative or neutral instead of energized, informed, and eager to collaborate. What's more, meetings that aren't engaging can lead to reduced innovation, vision, and creativity, leaving teams feeling drained, discouraged, or even alienated.

The good news is that when run well, staff meetings can help boost morale, improve communication, and encourage fruitful thought and idea exchanges. This guide contains the most important best practices designed to make your staff meetings productive and engaging for everyone.

Table of Contents

What is the purpose of a staff meeting?

Different types of staff meeting agenda templates, best practices for successful staff meetings, practices that are best avoided for staff meetings.

• Staff meeting FAQs

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The purpose of staff meetings is to bring everyone together to check-in with one another and communicate hurdles and needs. They are meant to keep everyone on the same page, increase accountability, engagement, and foster creative problem-solving.

When teams gather to share progress and build upon it together, they fuel your organization’s overall success. In turn, this contributes to one of the many benefits of staff meetings: a productive, engaged workplace culture that team members actually enjoy. Successful staff meetings should leave everyone feeling accomplished and optimistic.

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Using a template to guide your staff meetings is an excellent way to ensure they stay on track and everything that needs to be discussed is covered. Below are some sample agendas that you can also use as a team meeting minutes template. Each one is available for use in Fellow .

‍ All-hands meetings

These types of meetings bring every team member of an organization together for engagement and alignment. All hands meetings can also be known as an all staff meeting.

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Team meetings

These generally happen weekly within specific departments, and are designed to keep everyone focused on upcoming priorities.

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Management meetings

These meetings are reserved for those in leadership positions, and are meant to re-focus managers and decision-makers.

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Communication in a staff meeting is about more than information. It’s also giving credit where credit is due, holding team members accountable, and creating a sense of enjoyment and engagement with each other. In staff meetings, these are controlled by tone rather than content. With that in mind, some of the best practices for staff meetings include:

Using a staff meeting agenda

‍ Ideally, your staff meeting agenda should be created and shared with your team several days in advance, and attendees should be able to easily collaborate and build the meeting agenda together. Using a meeting agenda software like Fellow can make this easy. Fellow is an all-in-one meeting management platform designed to help leaders and their teams have fewer, shorter, more effective meetings with AI, behavior driving features, and seamless integrations.

With Fellow, attendees are automatically reminded to contribute to the meeting agenda in advance with smart sections. They can collaborate in real time, and share the agenda via Slack, email, and more. Plus, Fellow's chrome extension enables team members to keep their meeting agendas and notes side by side in their video calls, so they can focus on the discussion and engaging with each other.

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Maintaining a motivating tone

It should always be top of mind to use a tone that is positive and motivational when running a staff meeting. The tone you use as a leader sets the tone for how your team works, so people can perform at their best. What that motivating tone may be depends on the type of team, the individual team members, and the circumstances. ‍

Offering recognition

It's no secret that everyone liked to feel appreciated and valued, especially in a team dynamic. As a leader, acknowledging accomplishments and team members’ hard work is a great morale booster. You can easily remember to do this for every staff meeting by choosing a meeting template that has a section for wins and achievements.

Holding team members accountable

Accountability doesn’t mean coming down on someone in a staff meeting, which can do more harm for performance than good, due to the emotional impact. It means asking about progress, reminding your team of their responsibilities, and supporting your team to achieve their goals.

Fellow makes accountability seamless by keeping your action items where you meet, and integrating them with over 50 productivity tools

Asking the right questions

When staff meeting organizers ask the right questions, it encourages every meeting attendee to engage and participate. Your team will be more likely to engage in discussions if their input is valued and the questions feel relevant to them.

Spending time solving problems

‍ It’s tempting to fill the agenda with a long list of things to talk about, but it's important to make sure that staff meetings are an efficient use of everybody's time. Every good staff meeting should have an allocated time to discuss solutions to important issues is often much more productive.

Keeping things relevant

‍ No one wants to sit in a meeting that doesn’t require their input, so stick to meeting items that affect everyone present. The best way to facilitate this is ensuring that everyone adds their talking points to the agenda ahead of time, and keeping your staff meetings lean and efficient by only inviting the attendees who absolutely need to be there.

Taking and sharing meeting notes

In the past, it would be considered ideal to have a designated person take notes of what happened in the staff meeting, and then share those notes afterward. In 2024, there are better solutions on the market to take care of this for you. Fellow's AI meeting copilot, for example, records, transcribes, and summarizes your staff meetings with just a few clicks. Once the meeting has ended, it automatically shares all three elements with both attendees and people who were invited but couldn't make it.

Assigning all tasks

Previously, it would also be the responsibility of the staff meeting organizer to make sure any action items that come out of the meeting have a clear owner. Once again, Fellow's AI meeting copilot can automate this for you by automatically generating and assigning action items based on the meeting recording.

Asking for feedback

To ensure that your staff meetings are always relevant and a good use of everyone's time, asking for feedback regularly is an important best practice for leaders. This gives staff members the opportunity to voice any concerns or room for improvement in processes. To make collecting feedback easy, be sure to choose a meeting management software with feedback functionality built in.

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Now that we've shared which best practices to include in your staff meeting planning, here's a list of habits that are best practice to avoid to ensure your team gets the most out of every meeting. Be sure that you don’t:

‍ Bringing in outside speakers, creating busywork, or revisiting already-established policies and procedures can feel like a waste of time. It’s advisable to find ways to cut down the time meetings take from a busy team. One great way to do this is to leverage asynchronous talking points in your meeting. This enables you to bring attention to items you see fit without necessarily taking time from the meeting to discuss them.

It's always best practice to be respectful of everyone's time, and you can ensure that by starting meetings at their scheduled time, and finishing them at the time they're supposed to. This will help prevent meeting burnout for your team, and keep everyone engaged and focused on the discussion.

If your attention is on your phone, tablet, or separate laptop during a meeting, it sends the signal that the meeting isn’t important. Meeting and note-taking apps are an exception, of course, and it wouldn’t hurt to make this a rule for all attendees—but lead by example! Giving your undivided attention tells your team that you're focused and ready to engage.

‍ While major announcements, presentations , and organizational updates may require an all-hands meeting that is less engaging, most staff meetings should be an exchange of ideas rather than a one-way communication street. Collaborative staff meeting agendas are a great way to ensure everyone has a chance to speak and bring their own talking points to the table.

Ignore remote employees

Hybrid meetings can sometimes result in remote employees feeling disconnected, who are linked only by an audio or video link. Encourage, but don’t require, remote team members to have their cameras on. Unless your team is clearly too large, ensure you have an interaction with everyone involved in the meeting at least once, and that all resources are visible to remote team members as well.

Fall into an impromptu one-on-one

As a leader, your time and attention is naturally needed by many team members. That means some employees may feel that staff meetings are the ideal place to bring in off-topic issues. It’s important to recognize when a conversation with one team member in a staff meeting is going off track. Simply suggest a later one-on-one with them; They’ll be happy – and the rest of the team will be, too. ‍

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Staff Meeting FAQs

Are staff meetings necessary.

As an organization grows and adds teams, staff meetings certainly become essential. Failing to run effective staff meetings can lead to disjointed communication, a lack of collaboration, a stunted workplace culture and sense of unity, and an inability for team members to ask for and offer feedback on challenging projects.

Without a sense of inclusion in one another’s projects, team members become focused only on their own work and struggles. This tunnel vision and isolation eat away at morale and motivation. Everything is ten times harder to do—but good staff meetings can fix that.

How do you announce a staff meeting?

To announce a staff meeting, first select a communication method that all invitees are sure to receive, see, and RSVP to. If meeting invitees use Slack to collaborate, start a thread. You might also want to make a short Loom video for your announcement to give it a personal touch. You can also use email to send your announcement depending on your company’s communication culture.

According to the Vital meetings framework all meetings need PANTS (Purpose, Agenda, Notes, Tasks, Shared). In addition to the P urpose and A genda, clearly communicate the date, time, location, and recurrence in the announcement for your staff meeting. Staff meeting agenda , notes, and tasks can be attached, linked to, or put entirely in the calendar invite as long as it’s accessible to the attendees. 

If you're not sure where to start, check out these sample meeting agendas .

Summary: Share the meeting invite to attendees via the right channel. Include the purpose, agenda, notes, tasks, date, time, location, and recurrence. Remind attendees to add to the meeting agenda beforehand. 

How do you start a staff meeting?

The best way to start a staff meeting is to jump right into it. Grab everyone’s attention with some quick comments that confirm why they’ve come to the meeting in the first place, and why it’s important. Experts suggest opening the meeting using the IEEI framework: Inform, Excite, Empower, Involve. Share the purpose of the meeting, explain why the outcome of the meeting is important, describe the authority that has been given to meeting participants, and use an engaging question or round-table discussion that furthers the meeting’s goals.

How long should staff meetings last?

The reality is that time for you and your team is valuable. When meetings run on too long, that time becomes even further undermined when people’s attention spans and creativity starts to wane. It’s important to match the length of any staff meeting with its purpose, taking into account how long people can pay attention and participate with high energy and focus. Under an hour is usually ideal depending on the size of your team.

What should be included in a staff meeting?

There are a few best practices when it comes to creating worthwhile staff meeting topics. Ideally, your agenda will include items like important goals and discussion topics, such as meeting objectives, recognition of team member achievements, notable organizational changes or accomplishments, team member updates and goals, and action items.

Final thoughts

Staff meetings are essential when it comes to bringing everyone together for check-ins, communicating hurdles and needs, and keeping everyone on the same page, increasing accountability, engagement, and creative problem-solving. To ensure your staff meetings are great, use a staff meeting agenda, maintain a motivating tone, offer recognition, encourage accountability, ask the right questions, spend time solving problems, keep things relevant, and continually ask for feedback from your team. Avoid filling time, starting late, multitasking during the meeting, lecturing your team, and falling into impromptu one-on-ones.

Whether it’s taking and sharing meeting notes or collaborating on agendas, Fellow’s got you covered. Fellow in the only all-in-one meeting management solution designed to help you have better staff meetings with AI, behavior driving features, and seamless integrations. Keep your team accountable with the most integrated AI generated action items, and ensure everyone stays on the same page with AI recording, transcripts, and summaries for every meeting.

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Blog Marketing 15 Interactive Presentation Ideas to Elevate Engagement

15 Interactive Presentation Ideas to Elevate Engagement

Written by: Krystle Wong Aug 04, 2023

As attention spans continue to shrink, the challenge of engaging audiences in a short timeframe has never been more significant. Let’s face it — grabbing and keeping your audience’s attention can be quite the challenge, especially when time is ticking away. But fear not, I’ve got the perfect solution: interactive presentations!

Believe it or not, creating an interactive presentation is easier than you might think. In this guide, I’ll show you how to effortlessly turn ordinary slides into captivating experiences with 15 interactive presentation ideas that will leave your audience begging for more. From quirky polls and fun games to storytelling adventures and multimedia magic, these ideas will take your presentation game to the next level.

Venngage is a game-changer when it comes to empowering interactive presentations. With just a few clicks, users can customize their favorite presentation templates , add multimedia content and create immersive experiences that leave a lasting impact. Whether you’re a seasoned presenter or a newcomer, get started with Venngage to elevate your presentation game to new heights of engagement and creativity.

Click to jump ahead:

What is an interactive presentation?

15 ways to make a presentation interactive, 7 best interactive presentation software, what are some common mistakes to avoid when creating interactive presentations, interactive presentation faqs, how to create an interactive presentation with venngage.

An interactive presentation is a dynamic and engaging communication format that involves active participation and collaboration between the presenter and the audience. Unlike traditional presentations where information is delivered in a one-way manner, interactive presentations invite the audience to interact, respond and contribute throughout the session.

Think of it as a two-way street where you and your audience have a friendly chat. It’s like playing a fun game where you ask questions, get live feedback and encourage people to share their thoughts. 

To make a good presentation , you can utilize various tools and techniques such as clickable buttons, polls, quizzes, discussions and multimedia elements to transform your slides into an interactive presentation. Whether you’re presenting in-person or giving a virtual presentation — when people are actively participating, they’re more likely to remember the stuff you’re talking about.

Interactive presentations leave a lasting impression on the audience. By encouraging active participation and feedback, interactive presentations facilitate better understanding and knowledge retention. Here are 15 innovative 5-minute interactive presentation ideas to captivate your audience from start to finish:

1. Ice-breaker questions

Start your presentation with intriguing and thought-provoking questions or a fun icebreaker game. These questions should be designed to pique the audience’s curiosity and encourage them to think about the topic you’ll be covering. By doing so, you create an immediate connection with your audience and set the stage for a more engaged and attentive audience.

For example, if you’re giving a business presentation about management and leadership training, you could ask audience questions such as “What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received, and how has it impacted your career?”

2. Live polling

Incorporate live polls during your presentation using audience response systems or polling apps . This allows you to collect real-time feedback, opinions and insights from active participants. Live polling encourages active participation and involvement, making your presentation feel like a collaborative and interactive experience.

3. Q&A sessions

Encourage the audience to ask questions throughout your presentation, especially for pitch deck presentations . Address these questions in real-time, which fosters a more interactive and dynamic atmosphere. This approach shows that you value the audience’s input and promotes a two-way communication flow.

4. Clickable buttons

Add clickable buttons to your slides, allowing the audience to navigate to specific sections or external resources at their own pace. For example, you could include links to your social media accounts or extra reading materials in your education presentation to give further information about the topic and get your students engaged.

By providing this autonomy, you empower the audience to explore areas of particular interest, creating a more personalized and engaging experience through your interactive slideshow.

5. Storytelling

Incorporate anecdotes or personal stories related to your topic. Storytelling is a powerful way to emotionally connect with your audience, making your presentation more relatable and memorable. A little storytelling along with a set of creative slides draws the audience in and keeps them engaged as they follow the narrative.

6. Interactive charts and graphs

Use interactive charts and graphs that respond to user input to make your presentation interactive. For instance, allow the audience to click on data points to view more detailed information or to change the displayed data series. Creating charts with interactive visuals help the audience interact with the data, fostering better understanding and engagement.

7. Animated infographics

Add animations to your infographics, making them visually dynamic and progressive. Animated infographics reveal information gradually, keeping the audience curious and attentive. This transforms complex data into an easily digestible and engaging format.

Venngage’s extensive library of infographic templates is a powerful tool to visualize data and elevate the interactivity of your presentations. Personalizing the visuals ensures a cohesive and professional look throughout your interactive presentation. The templates are highly customizable, allowing you to adjust colors, fonts, and styles to match your presentation’s theme and branding. 

8. Gamification

Introduce an interactive quiz, puzzles, or challenges related to your presentation content. Gamification adds an element of fun and competition, motivating the audience to participate actively and boosting their learning experience. Here are some gaming presentation templates you could use. 

9. Virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR)

If applicable, leverage VR or AR technologies to provide immersive experiences. These interactive presentation tools transport the audience into a virtual or augmented environment, making your presentation more captivating and memorable.

10. Collaborative whiteboarding

Get your audience involved in your presentation by utilizing digital whiteboards or collaborative tools to brainstorm ideas collectively. This fosters teamwork and creativity, enabling the audience to actively contribute and feel a sense of involvement in the presentation.

11. Hyperlinked text

Keep the information in your slides minimal with a simple presentation and incorporate hyperlinks to direct viewers to relevant websites or blogs , resources, or additional information. This encourages self-exploration and gives the audience the opportunity to delve deeper into topics of interest.

12. Role-playing

Engage the audience in role-playing scenarios to explore different perspectives. Role-playing promotes active learning and helps the audience relate the content to real-life situations, enhancing their understanding and retention.

13. Embedded videos

Include video clips in your slides to provide visual explanations, demonstrations, or interviews. Videos add a dynamic element to your presentation, enriching the content and keeping the audience engaged.

14. Audience-generated content

Encourage the audience to contribute ideas, stories or examples related to your professional presentation . Audience-generated content fosters a sense of ownership and involvement, making the presentation more interactive and personalized.

15. Slide transitions

Use slide transitions to create smooth animations between slides. Well-planned transitions maintain the audience’s interest and keep the presentation slides flowing seamlessly.

Interactive elements aside, enhance your presentation with these guides on how to summarize information for a captivating presentation and how to make a persuasive presentation to captivate your audience. 

If you’re looking to create engaging and interactive presentation slides that captivate your audience, these presentation software options are sure to elevate your game:

Prezi is renowned for its dynamic and non-linear presentation style, enabling users to craft visually stunning and interactive presentations. With an array of templates and animation effects, Prezi enhances audience engagement, making your presentations more captivating and memorable.

2. Mentimeter

Mentimeter serves as an audience response system, empowering real-time interaction during presentations. Users can create interactive polls, quizzes, word clouds and more, allowing the audience to respond using their smartphones or other devices. This fosters active participation and provides valuable feedback instantly.

3. Google Slides

Google Slides is a free cloud-based presentation software that not only offers collaboration features but also enables real-time interactions. It includes add-ons and third-party integrations to further enhance interactivity, making it an excellent choice for collaborative and engaging presentations.

4. Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint, a classic presentation software, has evolved to incorporate more interactive features like live captions, real-time collaboration and interactive elements such as quizzes and forms. With its familiar interface and versatile functionalities, PowerPoint remains a reliable choice for interactive presentations.

5. Prezentor

Prezentor caters to sales-oriented presentations focusing on interactive storytelling and data-driven content. It offers analytics to track audience engagement and behavior during presentations, allowing you to fine-tune your approach and keep your audience hooked.

6. Opinion Stage

Opinion Stage is a visual and interactive data collection tool designed to engage and excite audiences whether sitting in a lecture hall, participating in a live Zoom, or watching an on-demand webinar. The Opinion Stage tools are simple and intuitive, making it easy to create attention-grabbing quizzes, surveys, and polls in minutes. A great way to spice up any presentation, encourage audience participation, and collect authentic feedback.

7 . Venngage

Venngage stands out as a versatile design tool that facilitates the creation of interactive infographics, data visualizations and presentations with ease. Offering various interactive elements and animations, Venngage empowers you to craft visually appealing and engaging presentations effortlessly.

With these interactive presentation software options at your disposal, you can unleash your creativity and deliver presentations that leave a lasting impact on your audience. So, go ahead and make your presentations interactive, captivating and memorable!

For more presentation software options, check out this blog on the 12 best presentation software for 2023.

Creating interactive presentations can be a game-changer for engaging your audience and enhancing your presentation skills, but steering clear of common pitfalls is essential. Here are some key mistakes to avoid when crafting your interactive presentations:

1. Overloading with interactivity

While interactivity is fantastic, bombarding your audience with too many interactive elements can backfire. Strive for a balanced approach that enhances engagement without overwhelming your listeners.

2. Ignoring audience relevance

Failing to tailor interactive elements to your audience’s interests and preferences can lead to disconnection. Make sure your interactions resonate with your specific audience for a more meaningful experience.

3. Not testing interactive elements

Skipping thorough testing of interactive features before showtime can spell disaster. Avoid technical glitches by diligently testing all interactive components in advance.

4. Poor timing and pace

Timing is everything, especially with interactive activities. Ensure seamless integration by planning your key points and the timing of your interactive elements carefully.

5. Lack of clear purpose

Every interactive element should serve a purpose and contribute to your presentation’s objectives. Don’t add interactions just for the sake of it — ensure they add value and align with your message.

6. Failing to engage beyond interactivity

While interactive elements are powerful tools, remember that content is king. Combine your interactive features with compelling storytelling and valuable insights to create an immersive and impactful presentation.

Incorporating animated slides into your interactive presentations enhances the overall appeal and interaction, turning an ordinary presentation into an engaging experience. Try it out with one of our animated presentation templates to get started. 

How do you start an interactive presentation?

Begin by grabbing the audience’s attention with an intriguing question or a surprising fact, setting the tone for a dynamic and engaging session.

Which type of presentation is the most interactive?

Workshops and seminars are often the most interactive types of presentations as they encourage active participation, discussions and hands-on activities.

How can interactive presentations enhance audience engagement?

Interactive presentations foster a two-way communication flow, involving the audience through polls, quizzes, discussions and multimedia elements, leading to increased interest, attentiveness and better retention of information.

What are some common interactive elements to include in a presentation?

Common interactive elements include clickable buttons, hyperlinked text, polls, quizzes, interactive charts, multimedia content and audience participation activities.

Can interactive presentations be used for educational purposes?

Absolutely! Interactive presentations are highly effective for educational purposes as they promote active learning, encourage critical thinking, and provide real-time feedback and knowledge exchange opportunities.

Need inspiration on how to give an engaging presentation ? Here are 120+ presentation ideas you could use. 

Venngage makes it easy for anyone to infuse interactivity into their presentations. From clickable buttons and hyperlinked text to interactive infographics and dynamic charts, Venngage offers a diverse range of interactive elements to captivate and engage the audience. Here’s how you can make your presentation more fun and interesting with Venngage:

• Sign up or log in to Venngage to access the platform.
• Choose a presentation template or start with a blank canvas to begin designing your interactive presentation.
• Add and edit slides in the Venngage editor to structure your presentation content effectively.
• Customize the design by selecting themes, fonts, colors and backgrounds to match your style and branding.
• Use interactive elements like buttons, links, pop-ups and hover effects to engage the audience during the presentation.
• Enhance engagement by incorporating interactive media such as videos and audio clips.
• Preview and test your entire presentation to ensure everything works smoothly before presenting it to your audience.
• Save your interactive presentation on Venngage and share it online or download it in various formats for presenting purposes.

Well, I hope these 15 5-minute interactive presentation examples can help unlock a new level of audience engagement for your next presentation. From fun quizzes and interactive storytelling to multimedia magic and gamified challenges, the possibilities are endless. So, don’t be afraid to experiment, tailor the ideas to suit your audience members and let your creativity shine.  

That said, remember to strike a balance and keep the interactivity purposeful and relevant. Some common mistakes to avoid when creating interactive slides include overloading the presentation with too many interactive elements and failing to align the interactive elements with the overall presentation goals and content. 

Got it? Great. Now let’s turn that boring presentation around!

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Table of Contents

Make your next staff meeting presentation memorable.

Following a recent staff meeting, I sat around a table talking with several co-workers about how to get more engagement and participation during discussion items and project updates. One colleague asked: if we wouldn’t simply talk at an audience during a training session, then why are we talking at our co-workers during items for discussion?

It was a fair question. Perhaps anyone responsible for leading a discussion item or a project update should put together some sort of modified lesson plan – even if they have only been allocated 15 minutes during the meeting agenda. Following are two simple suggestions, based on adult learning principles and the core features of a lesson plan , that can make your next presentation during a staff or team meeting memorable and engaging:

• Clearly define what kind of reaction, participation or feedback you want (or need) from your co-workers (for example: do you want feedback on a project you’ve drafted, do you need help brainstorming a solution to a problem)
• Create a clear opportunity for your colleagues to offer the participation that you need (perhaps asking: “what does everyone else think?” works for your team, but many teams – especially when meeting via conference call – need something more intentional designed to get everyone engaged during a conversation. Intentional design ideas include breaking the team into small groups for a quick discussion – you can’t just sit silently in a small group; for teams meeting via web conference, using the white board or other writing tools can help dispersed teammates feel closer to the action)

The photo below is an example of a team member taking it upon himself to engage the rest of our team during a project status report. Instead of enabling us to daydream about other things while he presented, he asked everyone to stand up and surprised everyone with an interactive flipchart (!!!) to ensure the team hung on every word of his project update.

Status updates don’t need to be mind-numbingly boring. And if your team needs a little nudge to give you the feedback you need during your next team or staff meeting presentation, don’t assume that they’ll pay attention to you (let alone give you feedback) just because they’re present in the meeting and you expect them to pay attention or offer input. Make sure you spend a few minutes coming up with a plan to design a presentation that offers an opportunity to your teammates to give you the input you need.

The Train Like A Champion Blog is published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.  If you think someone else might find this interesting, please pass it along.  If you don’t want to miss a single, brilliant post, be sure to click “Follow”!  And now you can find sporadic, 140-character messages from me on Twitter @flipchartguy.

Brian Washburn

Brian has over 25 years of experience in Learning & Development including the last 7 as CEO of Endurance Learning.

Brian is always available to chat about learning & development and to talk about whether Endurance Learning can be your training team’s “extra set of hands”.

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19 Team Meeting Games, Activities, & Ideas for the Office

By: Grace He | Updated: August 05, 2022

Here is a list of fun team meeting games, activities, & ideas for the office .

Team meeting games and activities are great ways to build a teamwork-centered culture and engage meeting participants. Examples of these activities include icebreakers, potlucks, and office dress-up days. These tactics are fundamental when teams come back to work after being remote for long periods or working in hybrid offices.

These suggestions are examples of team building exercises , team building games , and creative team meeting ideas . You can use these ideas at regular team building meetings , for morning meeting games , all-hands meetings , and company retreat activities .

This list includes:

• fun team meeting games for adults
• team meeting activities for team building
• unique team meeting ideas

Let’s get started!

List of team meeting games

Team meeting games and activities are usually best when low pressure, fun, and social. These exercises give officemates the chance to know each other and build trust through social bonds. Here are our top ideas for office games and activities.

1. Ice Breaker Questions

One of the easiest ways to get group members warmed up and ready to share during a team meeting is to start the conversation with a low-pressure ice breaker question. First, each team member states their name, role, and the answer to an easy question.

Here are some examples:

• What is your go-to coffee shop order?
• Which TV family would you most like to join?
• What was the last item you checked off your bucket list?

Icebreakers should only take a few seconds to answer and should not require much thought. However, you should also avoid questions that require employees to divulge sensitive information.

To make this activity more competitive, you can challenge participants to guess or recall coworkers’ answers. You could also turn the icebreaker questions into a truth-or-dare or would-you-rather style challenge.

Check out these lists of icebreaker questions , plus small group icebreaker activities and icebreaker games for large groups .

2. Game Room Meetings

One way to make meetings more playful is to hold huddles in the company game room. You can encourage participants to play matches in between topics to re-energize attendees during longer sessions. To make the break room a great place to destress and socialize, bring in board games, a Ping-Pong table, cards, and video games, and add maybe even comfortable chairs.

Here are more office game room ideas .

Get our free team building toolbox

• icebreaker games
• bingo cards

3. Scavenger Hunts

A scavenger hunt can be a good activity if you have a good chunk of time built into your meeting for games. These games are a fun way to engage the office team and improve collaboration and critical thinking skills. Scavenger hunts are also great activities for office outings, company picnics, and corporate field days .

To create a scavenger hunt, first, come up with a list of clues. Then give your team members the prompts and set a time limit for the hunt. This game works best when players complete the challenge in teams. At the end of the time limit, groups reconvene and count up clues. The team that retrieved the most objects wins the game.

Since you do not want your hunt to eat up too much time or divert too much attention from the meeting, you should select objects, clues, and challenges within a short distance of your meeting space.

Check out this list of scavenger hunt ideas for adults and these office scavenger hunt templates .

4. Office Mad Libs

This classic fill-in-the-blank game is fun and easy to customize. To prepare for the activity, print out Mad Libs for teammates to complete. Then, ask participants to pair off in teams of two to five, depending on the size of your group. One player in each group will be the reader and ask the other players to fill in the blanks with nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other words directed by the story. After five minutes, give each group a chance to read their page aloud. Laughter is a great way to loosen up the team and put employees in a positive mood for the start of the meeting.

Office trivia is a fun way for employees to get to know the history of the business. There are also many non-work trivia topics, such as sports, history, and pop culture. There are online trivia games that team members can play through their phones, such as Kahoot! and board games and card games for trivia, like Trivial Pursuit. To play a trivia game during a meeting, start by asking teammates to download an app or break into teams. Some games like office Jeopardy are playable on a whiteboard or using a projector. However, these types of games will take more preparation by the meeting facilitator. You can also use trivia card games. Make sure players understand the game’s instructions before you begin the rounds.

Here are lists of general trivia questions for meetings and unexpected trivia topics .

6. Werewolf

Some of the most interactive meeting games involve mysteries, tricks, and role-playing. Group games such as Mafia and werewolf are engaging and can kickstart imaginations before  brainstorming meetings. You will need one person to play the host to assign roles and keep the game moving through a storyline to play these games.

To play Werewolf, you will need at least seven players. Each player will receive a character card with at least one moderator, one seer, one doctor, and two werewolves. When more than 15 teammates are playing, you will add a werewolf for every four additional players. This game alternates between night and day scenes and is a great way to kick off a meeting with high energy and anticipation.

Checkout the rules for playing Werewolf.

7. Board Games

For team meetings, the most popular board games are quick games with low competition levels.

For example:

These games can be enjoyable and entertaining and can encourage interaction. We recommend playing these games as a warm-up or during a mid-meeting break.

Check out the best team building board games .

List of team meeting activities

Here is a list of activities to introduce fun and camaraderie into office meetings.

8. Potlucks

Potlucks are a wonderful way to get the office together over the lunch hour to socialize. Theming potlucks around different holidays or seasons is also a fantastic way to have a fun lunch beyond pizza Fridays. The best way to organize an office potluck is to use a Signup Genius to ask officemates to sign up to bring specific dishes to share. You will also want to ensure lunch breaks are taken in groups so that officemates have a chance to sit and eat together. It is also a good idea to have extra plates, napkins, and serving utensils on hand!

Combining a meeting with a potluck can be a way to encourage attendance and build community.

9. Dress-Up Days

Office dress-up days are a throwback to school spirit days. These occasions give employees a reason to be excited to get ready for work in the morning. Dress-up days can include repping your favorite sports team, casual days, decades days like 80s prom or 60s hippies, or a flashback to the 90s. To plan a dress-up day for a meeting, pick a theme and frequency, for instance, weekly, monthly, or on specified days during spirit weeks. Then, add the theme for each day to your office shared calendar, send out a group email to the office, and print out fliers promoting the dress-up days to post in the breakroom and other employee common areas.

Check out this guide to office spirit week ideas .

10. Personality Tests

Many folks enjoy taking personality tests and talking about their results. Finding out your personality type can help you better relate to officemates. According to the Myers Brigg Type Indicator, there are 16 different personality types. While waiting for the meeting to start, teammates can take a few minutes to take a personality test online. Then, once participants settle into the conference room, use the test results to spark discussion, share ideas, and get the group to open up.

Here is a list of online personality tests .

11. Wall of Fame

The Wall of Fame is a bulletin board with pictures of employees, post-it notes with words of affirmation or recognition, and praise from leaders and coworkers. This activity is a more interactive take on employee of the month and a fantastic way to boost employee morale and create a positive working environment. You can also post anniversary dates, new employee welcomes, birthdays, and other great news to share with the office. During the meeting, you can take time to draw attention to noteworthy board postings.

Check out more office bulletin board ideas .

12. Desk Decorating Contests

Letting employees decorate their desks for holidays or other events can allow their creativity and personality to shine. Decorating brightens up the office and creates a festive and inclusive atmosphere. Employees can vote on their favorite desk decorations, and the winning team can receive a prize and bragging rights. The best way to organize a desk decorating contest is to ensure plenty of planning time by announcing the competition through email, company bulletin or newsletter, and posting fliers in employee common areas.

Be sure to let officemates know the contest’s parameters, such as a specific theme, day of voting, and what the prizes are. Then, on the day of the meeting, you can send out a poll via company email, a ballot using an online program or Google Form, or make it simple by setting up jars on each desk and asking officemates to drop a marble in their favorite, or using a tally on the whiteboard.

This approach can be a way to bring fun and teamwork to office meetings. You can either call a meeting devoted solely to the contest or make the decoration or announcement of winners a small portion of the meeting.

Check out this list of office Christmas decorating ideas .

13. Lunch and Learns

Planning fun activities for the lunch hour that allow colleagues to relax, learn, and engage with each other is a great way to maximize meetings. Leaders often use lunch and learns to help employees explore the company’s core values or the organization’s mission in the community. Sometimes it is even fun to ask coworkers to take turns hosting the lunch and learn to share their skills or talents with the office. You will want to coordinate lunch and learn for a time when officemates can take their lunch break simultaneously. The facilitator of the lunch and learn will need to be prepared with a presentation for the group and a time for question and answer at the end.

List of team meeting ideas

Here is a list of ideas for meeting locations and unexpected types of meetings to strengthen team building and office relationships.

14. Escape Rooms

Escape rooms are a great way to build teamwork while socializing and completing challenges together. The team will make its way through a variety of clues and challenges to unlock the room and escape before time runs out. Nearly every medium to large city has at least one escape room that organizations and corporations can reserve for private company outings. You can also build a DIY escape room for teammates to solve together during a team building meeting.

Check out this guide to DIY escape room puzzles .

15. Volunteering

Volunteering allows officemates to give back to the community while working together for a good cause. You can check out the various opportunities in your community and pick a project that fits your team’s interests or abilities. For instance, your office can adopt a highway, trail, or park to help maintain. Once you choose an organization or project, set up a group volunteer time that fits most employees’ schedules. Next, recruit volunteers from within the office, or set aside a workday for the team to complete the service. You could even hold a volunteering meeting where participants talk about work topics while picking up trash, walking shelter dogs,  or painting picnic tables. Volunteering meetings give employees the chance to make progress on work topics while doing good for the greater community.

Here is a list of group volunteering ideas .

16. Retreats

Traveling with your coworkers can help the team grow closer and know each other outside of the work environment. These excursions can also develop skills and competencies. You can book retreats in remote locations that encourage breaks away from technology or in a city center where you can immerse yourself in the latest technology trends. Retreats often promote wellness and relaxation as well as focused team building. Retreats may seem overwhelming to plan at first, but it is easy to break these events down into more manageable pieces by having a small one-day offsite meeting with a specific team rather than the entire company.

Check out this list of corporate retreat locations and ideas .

17. Happy Hours

Office happy hours are a great way to get the team together in a casual environment to let off steam after work. Having a happy hour at a bar can be low-pressure on office managers because bars often have built-in entertainment like pool tables, darts, and board games. However, a bar-based venue may exclude employees under 21 or folks not comfortable socializing around alcohol. Alternate happy hour locations include coffee shops, bakeries, food courts, outdoor dining spaces at restaurants, or mini golf and bowling outings.

Holding a happy hour meeting is a good option for more informal topics and can help employees feel relaxed enough to contribute.

Here is a list of work happy hour ideas .

18. Family Picnics

Coworkers may love the chance to introduce their families to the people they work with daily. Office employees with kids will love attending a company picnic that includes face painting, bouncy houses, and other fun activities. Company picnics are a great way to give back to your employees and show appreciation to their families as well as broadcasting exciting company news or giving recognition to exemplary employees. You can even use this time while everyone is gathered to vote on new company initiatives.

Check out this guide to corporate family picnics .

19. Intramural Sports Meetings

Intramural meetings are a way to build teamwork skills while encouraging office workers to stay active. During these events, participants play sports matches like softball, kickball, dodgeball, basketball, or volleyball while discussing work topics on the court or during breaks. These out-of-the-box meetings can help participants hone their concentration and multitasking skills, as they will need to split their mindsets between the game and work. These meetings can also be an effective means of holding interdepartmental meetings and building cooperation and camaraderie between different areas of the organization.

Final Thoughts

The office should be a place of high productivity and enthusiasm for work. One of the best ways to achieve employee morale and success is to make the office environment fun and comfortable. Team meeting games, fun office activities, and other ideas make the office atmosphere a place of energy, enjoyment, and hard work.

Creating a fun, inviting, welcoming environment is very important to office managers who want success from their employees. Offices that value have social time are stronger, work together more efficiently, and are more motivated to succeed and reach goals.

Next, check out our lists of team building ideas for conference calls and virtual team meeting ideas .

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FAQ: Team meeting ideas

Here are answers to some of the most common questions about team meeting ideas. 

What are the benefits of team meeting games?

Team meeting games are a good way to start meetings because games help coworkers loosen up and be more comfortable sharing. Games also boost morale, increase engagement, and allow coworkers to better get to know one another. Having a fun office where employees are excited to come to work will also increase the productivity of team members, boost company culture, lower employee complaints, and make meetings more impactful and engaging.

How long should team meeting games be?

The time spent on games during team meetings can vary depending on how many team members are participating and the nature of the game. However, meeting facilitators should plan to spend anywhere from 5 to15 minutes on icebreakers and team games. You can also devote entire meetings to playing games and team building.

How do you make team meetings fun?

One of the best ways to make team meetings fun is to include games and icebreakers. Be sure to include every member of the team during these games and icebreakers so that everyone has a chance to speak and have their voice heard.

Author: Grace He

People & Culture Director at teambuilding.com. Grace is the Director of People & Culture at teambuilding.com. She studied Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, Information Science at East China Normal University and earned an MBA at Washington State University.

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People & Culture Director at teambuilding.com.

Grace is the Director of People & Culture at teambuilding.com. She studied Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, Information Science at East China Normal University and earned an MBA at Washington State University.

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• Include the time your application is at one of our passport agencies or centers. 
• You may get your passport on a different date than your family member or friend.
• Mailing times are not included in processing times . Consider the total time it will take to receive your passport when you are booking travel. 
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I need my passport sooner than i thought. what should i do.

Call the National Passport Information Center at  1-877-487-2778  ( 1-888-874-7793  TDD/TTY) to request expedited service for an extra $60. You may also add a 1-2 delivery service of your completed passport book for an extra $19.53. One-to-two day delivery is not available for passport cards. We only send cards via First Class Mail.

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You may receive your passport and the supporting documents in separate mailings. If you are renewing a passport card, we will send it to you via First Class Mail. We do not use 1-2 day delivery services if you only applied for a passport card.

Why do your processing times change?

We change our processing times as demand for passports changes during the year. From late winter into summer, demand for passports is generally higher than other periods of the year. Plan ahead and apply during our slower season from October through December. 

What happens to my processing times if I receive a letter or email requesting more information?

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