When your company starts to grow steadily, it can become nearly impossible for you as a leader to find time to meet with staff individually on a regular basis. Instead, consider alternative communication strategies to save time while ensuring you and your team stay on the same page.
To help you do this, 11 Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) members answered the following question:
“When your company starts getting too large to accommodate weekly one-on-one meetings with each staff member, what’s a system or tool you recommend companies try out in order to maintain transparent communication? Why?”
Here are the top methods they recommend.
1. Maintain a Dashboard With Employee Data
“One-on-one meetings can be tedious and repetitive for growing firms. So, to ensure that everyone is keeping up with the set deliverables, it’s best that you track the key metrics and maintain a dashboard that shows real-time data. It’s always better to let the data do the talking rather than have individuals showcasing their performance. Numbers never lie and help you maintain transparency across the board.” ~ Chris Klosowski, Easy Digital Downloads
2. Change Up One-on-One Pairings
“Having a company culture where everyone is encouraged to share issues is vital. While your company may have outgrown weekly one-on-one meetings with all employees, you can still keep weekly one-on-ones between the CEO and department leads. Then, the department leads can have weekly one-on-ones with their direct reports. This still maintains communication but is scaled up to reflect your new reality.” ~ Nic Weinfeld, Five to Sixty
3. Adjust the Purpose of One-on-Ones
“Switch one-on-ones to be about growth and personal progress, which shouldn’t require weekly check-ins. Everything else should be discussed in a team meeting. Most managers repeat themselves several times to their direct reports in individual meetings. We want to have everything consolidated into a meeting with all the people who need to hear it all at once.” ~ Marjorie Adams, Fourlane
4. Host Weekly Action Reviews With Entire Teams
“We follow EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) and host weekly WARs (Weekly Action Reviews) within and across multiple teams. This allows us to meet weekly and discuss current projects and bottlenecks. It’s possible for team members to experience the same issues, so it allows you to address them at once instead of individually. You can also share the same information at once instead of multiple times.” ~ Nick Friedman, College Hunks Hauling Junk & Moving
5. Use Collaborative Technology Like Asana
“It may not be possible to hold regular one-on-one meetings when your team starts to grow, but transparent communication is important for the overall success of the team. If you can’t hold one-on-one meetings, you can use collaborative tools that keep everyone in the loop. Asana is one such tool that can help you do that. You can set tasks, add collaborators, set a due date and a lot more.” ~ Josh Kohlbach, Wholesale Suite
6. Document Workflows Using Apps Like Slack
“A good system or tool to try out when you’re unable to have weekly one-on-one meetings with each staff member is a communication platform like Slack. This is important because it helps keep everyone in the loop by allowing them to communicate easily and quickly with each other. We use it to document activities and workflows and to inform everyone about important things — and it works!” ~ Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
7. Create an Information Hub
“A simple solution is to create a ‘hub’ for information. This can be a simple WordPress site, an Evernote document or just a Google Sheet. The point is to have everything a person needs to know in one place that is easily accessible and updated regularly. This is important because it helps reduce confusion and ensures that everyone is on the same page.” ~ Blair Williams, MemberPress
8. Host Monthly Town Halls
“If your business has become too large to host one-on-one meetings with everyone on your team, you may want to consider hosting a monthly town hall meeting. I had to switch to this approach a few years ago when I realized I didn’t have the time to meet with everyone on our team each week. I use our town hall to review essential updates, praise top performers and let everyone know what to expect next.” ~ John Turner, SeedProd LLC
9. Create Standardized Meeting Agendas
“Each team should conduct one weekly meeting following a standardized format where you strictly discuss key performance indicators. Make this meeting time-bound and allot specific time slots to each attendant. Refrain from diving into discussions and focus only on tasks completed, the ones left incomplete and the roadblocks faced. This helps maintain transparent communication in growing firms.” ~ Jared Atchison, WPForms
10. Hold Daily Standups
“Daily standups are an excellent way to maintain transparent communication across the board. A company can ask its employees to fill out standups on a regular basis using a communication app like Slack. This facilitates a transparent flow of information as you stay up to date with progress on daily deliverables and become informed of the roadblocks encountered to recommend the best course of action.” ~ Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
11. Send Out Company Memos
“A company memo is an excellent solution if you want to maintain consistent communication with your team, even if you can’t have one-on-one meetings. We create a weekly memo for our team that goes over product changes and updates as well as broader company news. These notices help keep everyone on the same page without sacrificing countless hours for meetings.” ~ Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
Image: Depositphotos
This article, "Team Too Big for Regular One-on-Ones? Try These 11 Communication Strategies Instead" was first published on Small Business Trends