Plan a Creative Team Meeting: 5 Tips for One Away from the Office

Summer months are a great time for marketing and creative teams to take stock, review progress so far for the year, and start planning for the rest of the year. Many teams will include an offsite meeting as part of their review and planning. Offsite meetings are always set with the best of intentions, but so often these meetings take a sharp left turn and veer into boredom, off on tangents, or general unproductiveness. To keep your team focused and make your next offsite productive, consider some of the following suggestions.

Plan a Creative Team Meeting Ahead

• Make sure you have enough time to cover everything you need to. If you have limited time, then limit the agenda. Better to cover a few things well than to cover everything badly. As you are building out the agenda, be sure to also schedule breaks. Stopping for a coffee or some fresh air keeps everyone going strong.

Understand how time of day affects mood and productivity. In his book “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing“. Daniel Pink describes studies that show that different times of day lend themselves to different moods and levels of productivity. People tend to be sharper in the mornings, so start your day off with agenda items that require more brainpower. After lunch, people tend to decline, so bring out the coffee and step off the accelerator. Maybe try a team-building activity, or knock out some easy to-dos off the list. As the afternoon wears on, most people begin to recover and hit a highly creative time of day. At the end of the day, shift to more creative, brainstorming tasks.

Plan a Creative Team Meeting Around Necessary Reports

The fastest way to drive your offsite right off a cliff is to ask someone to “just go ahead and pull that report real quick”. Have the data, reports, and key stats ready before the meeting starts. It can be a good idea to have extra, more detailed reports already on hand if the conversations does steer in a new, interesting direction, but please don’t send someone digging through Salesforce in the middle of the offsite.

Set a Goal for the Team Meeting

You should really already know to do this, but let’s say once more for the people in the cheap seats: Set a goal for the offsite! Decide what you want to accomplish during this meeting, build the agenda around that goal, and use it as your guiding light when the conversation wanders too far.

Moreover, having a stated goal will help keep everyone engaged and give what can be a really long day trapped in a conference room with your coworkers some forward momentum.

Follow Up

This is almost as forehead-smacking obvious as #4, but we all know this doesn’t happen as consistently as it should. Appoint someone to be a dedicated note-taker during the offsite. Mark off time at the end to review notes and discuss next steps (and who owns them!) and then have the note-taker send out a recap email after the meeting.

Lytho helps you streamline workflows and harmonize all brand collateral under a single, uniform platform. Feel free to reach out to us by scheduling a demo and learning how our creative solutions can boost the effectiveness of your creative projects. We look forward to speaking with you!