How to run team meetings people don’t dread

The regular team meeting is easy to underestimate because it feels routine. It is just the team meeting. It happens every week/fortnight/month. It is an hour or so on the calendar.

But think about what it represents. It is one of the few regular occasions the whole team is together at the same time. Over a year, a weekly meeting is fifty meetings. If those fifty meetings are broadly forgettable, that is not just a lot of wasted time, it is fifty missed opportunities to build a team that thinks together, communicates well, and knows what it is working towards.

Steven Rogelberg, whose research on workplace meetings is among the most comprehensive available, identifies what he calls "meeting recovery syndrome": the time and energy employees need to regain focus after leaving a meeting that served no useful purpose (Rogelberg, 2019). A recurring meeting that drains people week after week is a slow, consistent drag on morale and performance.

But, on the other hand, a good team meeting, run well, becomes a genuine home for the team: a place where people connect, think together, share what matters, and leave with a clearer sense of direction.

Most managers design the recurring team meeting around what they need to communicate. There are updates to share, decisions to relay, things the team needs to know. The meeting becomes a vehicle for information delivery, and participation drops because there is nothing for most people to meaningfully participate in.

From my experience, the team does need information shared with them on a regular basis. So, in my team meetings, I spend some time updating the team on things they couldn’t otherwise know. Typically, this is what I have gleaned from leadership team meetings I have attended and interactions I have had with others around the organisation. But that update session is only allotted 10 or 15 minutes on the agenda, so that there is time for more participative items.

Julia Austin, writing in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge series, suggests, rightly in my view, that this meeting is much more about your team's needs than yours (Austin, 2018). Therefore, before you design the agenda or if you are thinking about revamping your current approach, it is worth asking your team what they want from the time they spend together.

The goal is to move from information delivery to shared purpose. What does the team need from this hour together that they cannot get any other way? That question usually produces a better meeting than any formulaic agenda template.

Austin makes a further point worth bearing in mind: a new meeting format needs at least four to six sessions to settle before you evaluate whether it is working. Changing the format too frequently creates its own problems. Give it time, then ask the team how it is going (Austin, 2018).

The most common recurring meeting problem is status updates. Each person reports what they did last week. Some people are succinct, other less so (we’ve all been there). People listen to the parts that apply to them and drift during the rest. The hour ends and nothing has really happened.

Status updates that could be shared in writing (a brief message, a shared document, a team channel) do not belong in the meeting. The meeting is for things that need collaborative effort, such as problems or discussions that benefit from multiple perspectives and learning that needs to be discussed rather than just received.

Austin recommends soliciting substantive topics from the team around 48 hours before each meeting (this is what we do in my team). These should not be the types of things that belong in one-to-ones and in operational meetings. They should be things worth thinking about together such as a process that is not working or something a team member has learnt that others would benefit from knowing (Austin, 2018).

Once you have the agenda, send it 24 hours in advance. People arrive prepared rather than surprised. If there are materials worth reading beforehand, share those too, and read them yourself. Rogelberg's research is emphatic on this point: the leader's level of preparation sets the standard (Rogelberg, 2019).

Allocating set times for each item helps too. This helps protect the meeting from the tendency to run for too long on one topic and rush or drop everything else.

Rogelberg identifies the leader’s behaviour as the single biggest predictor of meeting quality (Rogelberg, 2019). A useful benchmark is that, as the leader, you should not be speaking for more than a third of the time (Austin, 2018). If your voice is heard most, you are back to information sharing.

This means:

This is where Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety becomes directly relevant. People's willingness to speak honestly in a group depends on whether they believe it is safe to do so (Edmondson, 1999). The team meeting is where this standard can be set and maintained and is a place that should epitomise psychological safety.

When someone raises a problem and you respond with open curiosity, or when you say: "I'm not sure, what do you think, team?" rather than improvising an answer, you are showing people what kinds of contributions are welcome.

Research by Bouskila-Yam and Zaidman (2025), based on direct observations of real team meetings, found that when team leaders listened well, two things followed: team members spoke for longer, and leaders interrupted less. This is worth reflecting on. Interrupting, even with good intentions, signals that what you have to say is more important than what the other person is saying. Over time, that means people offer less and hold back more.

Allowing people to finish, paying close attention, and waiting before you speak are among the more concrete things you can do to make the meeting a collaborative space, rather than one where some people perform for the leader and some stay quiet.

One practical thing that I do is to never chair our team meetings. I rotate the chairing of the meeting around team members. This increases engagement, gives different people a sense of ownership, and provides a development opportunity to the less confident team members. It also frees me up to pay attention to what is happening in the room.

I have team members all over the UK so, like many teams, our regular meetings are entirely online, or with a mix of people in the room and on screen. The principles above apply, but virtual meetings bring some additional challenges worth addressing directly.

Kreamer, Stock and Rogelberg (2021) surveyed over 270 employees about their experiences of virtual meetings and found a clear link between leader skill and meeting effectiveness. Their research identified several behaviours that matter most in a virtual context.

Personal connection needs more deliberate attention online than it does in person. The small interactions that happen naturally before and after an in-person meeting do not happen on a video call. Building two or three minutes at the start for informal conversation before the agenda begins is not a waste of time. It is a good way to maintain the human dimension of a team that can be diminished by always meeting on screen (Kreamer et al., 2021).

Setting expectations is also important, especially with new teams or team members. It is worth naming how you want people to contribute: whether to use the chat function for questions, whether to unmute and speak, whether to use the raise-hand feature. Without this, people who are unsure how to participate may default to silence (Kreamer et al., 2021).

Active facilitation requires more effort online because the cues that tell you someone wants to speak are harder to read on a screen, and the temptation to multitask is much higher. Checking in with specific people by name, monitoring the chat, and pausing regularly to invite questions are all more necessary virtually than they might be in person. Keeping meetings as short as possible also reduces what Kreamer et al. (2021) call "Zoom fatigue" and creates positive pressure to stay focused.

Meetings that drift to a close (where people log out uncertain what was decided or who is doing what) undo much of the value of the previous hour. Keep the final five minutes for a clear close: what was decided, who owns each action, what are the deadlines. This takes very little time and removes any post-meeting confusion.

The recurring meeting is one of the few regular opportunities to build team cohesion: the sense of being part of something together, rather than individuals who happen to share a manager.

Over time, a well-run meeting becomes a team ritual. People know what to expect. They come prepared. They leave feeling the time was worth spending, and they feel more connected with each other. Maybe they have even had some fun.

Austin, J. B. (2018). Mastering the team meeting. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/master-the-team-meeting

Bouskila-Yam, O., & Zaidman, N. (2025). Listening in team meetings: What is the team leader's influence? Journal of Communication Management, 29(4), 585-601. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCOM-02-2024-0032

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Kreamer, L., Stock, G., & Rogelberg, S. G. (2021). Optimizing virtual team meetings: Attendee and leader perspectives. American Journal of Health Promotion, 35(5). https://doi.org/10.1177/08901171211007955

Rogelberg, S. G. (2019). The surprising science of meetings: How you can lead your team to peak performance. Oxford University Press.

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