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Bringing joy to your meetings is a way to bring joy into your company. When people come to meetings, they come with the mood of their last call, personal interaction, email they read, or any other meeting they attended. In addition, their attention is still stuck on other subjects.
In order to get everyone engaged in your meeting, think of doing something different at the start by beginning your meetings with what is called “positive updates.”
How to do it?
When you start your meeting, ask participants to share one positive thing (personal or professional) that happened to them lately or since the last time you met. It can be anything they are enthusiastic about, proud of, or interested in. You should warn them that they have a limited time to give their update. Encourage fast feedbacks from the group, but save the long answers for after the meeting.
According to the book, The 3 Promises: Find Joy Every Day. Do What You Love. Make A Difference, facing more positive reaction at work leads to better results in business and in life. If you generate the occasion for team members to genuinely produce their own positive emotion, you are beginning your meetings with more joy.
What are the other reasons why this approach is powerful?
- Concentrating on your team members’ attention and involving them with your request to share.
- Reminding them to keep an eye on what is going well in their lives, not just what is wrong.
- Helping them reach their positive emotions. When they remember anything good that occurred in their lives, they are more prone to feel joy, pride, excitement, gratitude, enthusiasm, encouragement, or optimism.
- Knowing more about your team members. In this way, you are getting into what is important to them and what makes them unique. What provides them with joy? What makes them happy? When do they succeed? The greatest source of joy may be the person just next to you.
- Understanding what they enjoy to do and what they are good at achieving. You can help them find more opportunities to do what they do well.
- Knowing them better. You will be able to discover what is important to them in their short feedbacks.
- Giving your team members the occasion to know more about each other.
All this should approximately take five minutes, depending of course on the size of the group. Just ask each person to share with the others something positive. Consequently, team members will listen and you will have everyone engaged. In this way, you will have created an occasion to fill your meetings and your business with more joy.
