There is nothing more frustrating than going to a weekly staff meeting that is content free. Or worse, ends up as a weekly status meeting. Please! If it is a project status meeting, call it that. If it is a staff meeting, please, please, please, make it about something other than project status updates.

Maybe for some managers, staff meetings are equivalent to project status meetings. It’s their chance to get an update on the current project. So call it that and come up with an agenda so everyone comes prepared with the information you want.

For me, a staff meeting is more than project updates. It’s my opportunity to review what’s going on in other areas of the company, get updates from HR, talk about upcoming events such as conferences, meetups, or company parties. And if I don’t have enough content for a weekly staff meeting, I don’t have one. I don’t have a meeting just to have a meeting.

Create an agenda for your staff meetings and make them productive. Be clear about what you want the people in the meeting to contribute. And when you don’t have agenda items, give yourself permission to just cancel the meeting. It shows you are respectful of your staff’s time and that you aren’t meeting just to meet.

Here’s a sample staff meeting agenda that I have used:

1. Update from HR on Hiring
2. Passdown (from what I have learned from my manager)
3. Guest speaker on xyz topic
4. Roundtable: what each person would like the rest of the team to know about his/her team. Limit to 3 minutes or less per person. Focus on interesting tidbits/problems/successes rather then status updates. For example, if I am managing the user experience team and they are working on a new style guide, I would share: The user experience team completed the color selection for icons used in all apps. If people are interested, I can set up a meeting to go over this in more detail.