15 Team Meeting Ideas That Help Employees Stay Focused

The average employee spends around four and a half hours in meetings each week. That’s more than two workdays per month. 

That would be fine if all meetings were productive and energizing, but according to Slack’s State of Work report, more than one-third of employees report spending too much time in meetings.

Finding meeting alternatives helps, but when meetings do need to happen, they don’t need to drain employees. When run well, team meetings can improve productivity and help with team cohesion.

In this article, we’ll explore team meeting ideas that can help you hold the kind of meetings that keep employees engaged and focused.

Creating a positive environment for effective team meetings

A meeting should always be an open, supportive environment, regardless of the type of meeting or its purpose. This is more than a feel-good goal; it’s the best way to encourage participants to voice new, innovative ideas.

Here’s how to curate a positive meeting environment:

• Establish clear meeting objectives. Distribute an agenda in advance so participants can prepare for the meeting. Assign roles like facilitator, timekeeper, and note-taker to make the process more efficient.
• Start and end meetings on time, and keep discussions focused on agenda items.
• Review action items and task ownership from the previous meeting to ensure accountability and follow-through.
• Invite only relevant team members to avoid overcrowding and disengagement.
• Rotate meeting leaders and have different stakeholders lead various parts of the meeting.
• Create a safe space for open dialogue by setting guidelines for respectful communication. Promote inclusivity by encouraging quieter members to speak up or ask questions in the chat.
• Celebrate success and offer constructive feedback to promote positive interactions and support professional growth.
• Use interactive tools like polls, whiteboards, and breakout rooms in digital meetings to support dynamic conversations.
• Address conflict professionally and constructively to resolve disagreements while maintaining respect and trust among team members.
• Regularly check in with team members to see if they find meetings meaningful and useful.

For more team meeting ideas, consider these 15 suggestions.

1. Make team user manuals

A user manual is a document that enables individual team members to describe their work style, communication preferences, and other traits colleagues should know. Compile these manuals into a team handbook alongside other information for the team.

User manuals help team leaders know how to best engage each person during a meeting. For example, if someone writes in their user manual that they’re the quiet and thoughtful type, the team leader knows to make space for them to speak. If someone else mentions that keeping their hands busy helps them focus, the team leader knows to let them doodle during meetings.

2. Clarify roles and responsibilities

Assign any necessary roles before the meeting to clarify responsibilities and avoid redundancies. Some common meeting roles include:

• Leader. Sets the meeting agenda and drives all decision-making.
• Recorder. Takes meeting notes and writes a summary of next steps after the meeting (if an AI program is not doing so). Store meeting notes in a central location everyone can access, such as a Slack canvas. 
• Timekeeper. Watches the clock and makes sure a reasonable amount of time is spent on all agenda items.
• Participant. No specialized role, but actively participates in discussions and responds to questions.

3. Share a “learning of the week”

During regular team meetings, have everyone exchange bits of wisdom with a learning of the week.

Invite each member of the team (including yourself) to describe one thing they learned that week and how they learned it. This helps create connections while giving your team space to learn from each other.

4. Engage participants with ice-breaking activities

Starting meetings with a casual icebreaker can support team building while helping people loosen up and feel more comfortable pitching ideas. Some icebreakers you can try include:

• Two truths and a lie. Each team member shares two truths and one lie about themselves. The rest of the team guesses which statement is the lie.
• Question of the day. Participants ask entertaining questions that help others get to know them, such as what they would bring to a desert island or which famous person they’d like to have dinner with.
• Guess who. Each participant anonymously writes down a random fact about themself. The meeting leader reads each fact, and participants guess who it applies to.
• This or that. Give participants a choice between two different things (for example, dogs or cats, summer or winter) and then open up a lively discussion about why people chose either.

5. Encourage participation from remote team members

Remote participants might feel tempted to check out, but activities designed for virtual meetings can prevent that. Take advantage of remote participation with icebreakers like:

• Online trivia. Host a brief trivia game with questions about the team’s interests or random fun facts. (Search for trivia apps on Slack for ideas.)
• Virtual scavenger hunt. Create a list of items for team members to find in their homes and share on camera. (Make it fun and creative!)
• Two-minute talent show. Each team member gets two minutes to showcase something in their home that demonstrates a talent or hobby, such as a scarf they knitted or a musical instrument they like to play.

When getting down to the business of the meeting, make the most of the technologies available on digital meeting platforms like Slack huddles by:

• Encouraging participants to react to ideas in real time with emojis
• Using digital polls or surveys to collect instant feedback
• Collaborating on a virtual whiteboard or Slack canvas
• Taking advantage of the meeting chat to share links and other resources that participants can reference during the discussion
• Screen sharing so participants can follow along or complete collaborative tasks
• When appropriate, using multimedia features like unique backgrounds or music to add some fun to the meeting

6. Ask interactive questions to spark conversations

Get everyone engaged while also accomplishing the business of the meeting with agenda items designed to be interactive. Some interactive team meeting ideas include:

• Round-robin updates. Each team member shares a quick update on their current project or tasks. They can also discuss any challenges and ask for help.
• Success stories. Each team member has an opportunity to share and celebrate recent successes and how they benefit the team or a project.
• Brainstorming. Pose a challenge or question and have the group collaborate on developing solutions.
• One word. Raise a challenge, project, or idea and ask each participant to summarize their feelings about it with one word.

7. Rotate roles to keep perspectives fresh

Rotating roles makes the division of labor fairer and prevents people from feeling stuck in a rut. Rotate the timekeepers and notetakers, and when possible, consider switching up the facilitator role, too.

8. Review weekly goals

Set specific, achievable goals for the week, and use your team meetings or daily standups to review progress and celebrate achievements against those goals. For example, a sales team with weekly sales goals could use the meeting time to share the status of key deals, celebrate successes, and discuss strategies for moving lingering deals forward.

Structuring team meetings around goals helps hold teams accountable and gives them a sense of forward momentum.

9. Support professional development

Team meetings provide a great opportunity for bite-size professional development sessions. Consider incorporating short training sessions each month or quarter on things like sales techniques, product knowledge, or industry trends.

As always, interactive meetings are most effective, so try to make these trainings participatory. You can use role-playing exercises to practice sales pitches or incorporate real-time virtual quizzes to reinforce new learnings.

10. Gamify brainstorming sessions

To inject energy into brainstorms, consider gamifying them and turning them into a friendly competition. First, pair up team members for a partnered brainstorm. Then, have each pair present their best ideas to the whole team. The pair with the most innovative solution wins a small prize.

Another brainstorming activity to try is “brainwriting.” Each team member writes an idea at the top of a sheet of paper, then passes that paper to the person next to them (you’ll have to get creative with this for remote meetings). The next person has a limited amount of time to develop the first person’s idea. This process continues until everyone receives their original idea along with the whole team’s perspectives.

11. Use interactive collaboration tools

Whether the meeting is in-person or virtual, digital collaboration tools help get everyone involved. You can use digital whiteboards to encourage collaborative brainstorming, letting everyone make suggestions or connections to each other’s ideas in real time.

Or, solicit opinions with real-time poll or survey apps. These approaches surface results immediately, so the meeting facilitator can invite discussion by sharing a poll’s results or select specific survey comments (anonymous or not) to explore in more depth.

12. Try visualization and storytelling techniques

Most people are visual learners, so visual activities can help ideas stick. For example, your team can collaboratively develop storyboards to help them visualize processes, customer journeys, or project plans.

Storytelling is another tactic that can help people retain new ideas. You can incorporate storytelling into your more informal meetings with activities like role-playing customer interactions or potential project challenges.

13. Conduct strategic planning and reviews

Employees often feel more engaged—both in meetings and in their work—when they feel they are given opportunities to speak up about strategy. You can provide those opportunities in team meetings by periodically revisiting your organization’s vision, mission, and strategic goals and having team members assess how well they’re living up to them.

Invite participants to analyze the organization’s strengths and weaknesses and discuss what factors currently affect them. Then, have them brainstorm ways they can work together to advance the organization’s success.

14. Encourage problem-solving and decision-making

Loop team members into your problem-solving process to take advantage of multiple perspectives and give everyone a sense of ownership.

You can use a decision matrix to have your team systematically evaluate options and reach decisions backed by data. Or, when there’s a product-related issue to resolve, have team members conduct rapid ideation and prototyping sessions to explore new opportunities. For collaborative risk management, invite team members to make a list of potential future challenges and engage them in discussion about ways to mitigate them.

15. Make team meetings more engaging and productive with Slack huddles

Slack’s huddles feature offers an informal, collaborative setting for spontaneous virtual meetings. Hop on a huddle whenever you need to walk through challenges, talk through ideas, or catch up over coffee. You can also quickly gather teammates for informal brainstorming, easy screen sharing, and real-time feedback exchange.

Any links, documents, and messages sent in a huddle are automatically saved in Slack. Plus, meeting notes are saved to a canvas, complete with key takeaways and action items—so no team member needs to waste time writing them. Instead, Slack AI automatically takes minutes, surfaces key takeaways, and assigns action items.

Teams that use huddles see a 37 percent uptick in productivity, according to Slack’s FY24 Customer Tracking Survey. If you’re looking for a simple way to make your team meetings more effective, you’ve got it.

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