Guidance for Managers
Life is short
Too short to sit in unproductive meetings, which produce misunderstanding, stress people out and harm an organisations culture – so try to relax and enjoy the team briefing. Meetings can be productive and transform. Run well, meetings can also be a time and place to learn and grow.
The team brief will only work if everyone involved in the process is committed to making it work. Everyone acknowledges that face-to-face contact can sometimes be difficult, but if you are a manager with a responsibility to deliver a team brief then it is your role to make sure that everyone within your team fully understands what team briefing is about and why they are taking part.
There a simple 10 step process to guide you through the delivery of your team brief.
The following information is designed to help you to prepare and explains the standards we have put in place to ensure consistency in delivery across the trust.
The team brief meeting. Get it right, and achieve much more.
The aim of the team brief meeting is to make it participative and productive. The team brief should last no longer than 20 minutes. Briefings should be fairly informal and by all means adopt an approach which best suit’s the culture and nature of your team.
Preparing for the team brief
As with all meetings it is best to put some preparation in beforehand. Here are some pointers to help you prepare:
- Be clear: avoid unfamiliar terms, acronyms or jargon
- Be brief: don’t ramble or go off point
- Be interesting: use real life examples that the group will recognise and help bring the team brief to life and motivate people
- Be in control: arrange the group so that you can monitor the reaction to different messages as you go along
- Be positive: Don’t give your own personal views about decisions that have been taken at board level.
- Be you: use your own words and style to engage your team
Timing
First of all make yourself familiar with the team briefing calendar and work out when you will be expected to deliver your brief to your team. You may need to discuss this with your line manager to ensure that the correct cascade mechanism is in place.
If you have regular meetings with your team, when choosing dates for your brief you should try to aim for a day when most of your team is around – take into consideration those who work part-time or on shifts/rotas.
Publicising the briefings
Once you’ve got all the arrangements in place make sure that you give your team enough notice so that they are able to attend. Make sure everyone knows where the venue is. If you’ve set dates for a few months in advance it’s worth letting people know about the dates all at once so that they can plan ahead.
Managing the team brief
Once the meeting has started its up to managers to:
- clearly explain and outline the purpose of the meeting
- talk through the agenda
- explain how the meeting works and that staff can ask questions
- nominate a memeber of staff to capture the feedback
- try not to interupt staff, let them have they say but make sure they dont go to far of track
- summarise the discussion points
- review ideas positively
Make a note of any questions raised which you haven’t been able to answer and either follow up with your line manager or post the question to area of the website. Remember is very important to feedback the response to questions
Encouraging discusssion
Two-way discussion is key to the success of the team brief and team building. during the team brief managers should:
- encourage everyone to listen to ideas and suggestions
- encourage everyone to feedback and make sure everyone has a chance to speak
- encourage opinions from quieter members of the team to ask questions
- encourage different points of view
