This article is written by Sandra Naranjo Bautista, founder and CEO of Better Govs and former minister and Acting Vice President of Ecuador.

Staff meetings can play a key role in getting things done in public service. They are a space for coordination, conflict resolution and engagement.

If you work in the public sector you know getting things done isn’t always easy. Trying to organise a group of people, each with their own priorities, towards the same goal can be a real challenge.

As a former minister and Acting Vice President of Ecuador, I’ve seen the benefits well-run staff meetings can bring to teams in the public service. They can improve coordination, solve potential conflicts and increase the engagement and motivation of your team members.

Here are three ways you can use staff meetings to engage your team and orient them towards achieving results:

Align everyone towards the same goals

An important part of a leader’s role is coordinating the effort towards a particular objective. A clear goal is essential for that purpose. You can start by defining, as a team, your yearly and quarterly goals. What is it that you want to achieve and how will you measure your success?

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Use your quarterly goals to guide your meetings and give them a sense of purpose. For complex goals, break them up into pieces and monitor progress on those. Your team will feel like these goals are more manageable.

With that clear, in subsequent staff meetings you can do a group check-in on progress towards the quarterly goals, as defined by the team previously. I used to prepare a monitoring matrix with a box for each of my team members: I would include the most important things they were working on and the deadlines against them, as well as other tasks for the week.

In our staff meetings, we would do a brief overview of the things we were working on that week that were part of the monitoring matrix. We’d report on progress made and identify any possible problems that would affect our objectives. Sometimes it was a matter of solving internal issues, other times it meant coordinating with other agencies. This was the perfect opportunity to anticipate complications.

Create space for dissent and conflict resolution

When you work as a team two things are certain. First, you need each other’s help to achieve the team’s objectives. In other words, you have to coordinate and work together. While this is obvious, it doesn’t make it easy. The priorities of one team member are not necessarily the same as those for another one.

Second, there will be tensions and disagreements. That’s normal. The role of the team leader is to create space to solve these tensions as quickly as possible and coordinate efforts to keep making progress.

Discussing a disagreement with another team member is never pleasant. But without discussion, the problem not only goes unsolved: it starts to have wider consequences.

When you know someone personally, there are more opportunities for fruitful interaction and collaborative work.

Staff meetings are the perfect opportunity to create that space. Because it’s the place where common goals are set and monitored, it’s easier to reduce conflict by focusing on common objectives rather than on personal issues. Staff meetings also give everyone the chance to openly discuss potential tensions and solve them.

In my experience, sometimes problems are discussed and solved in the meeting, but often they get solved beforehand, so they don’t have to come up when everyone is there. In either case, the meeting has served its purpose.

In the public sector, we are always busy. It’s easy to get trapped in our own area’s priorities and lose sight of the bigger picture and how we are a piece of a bigger organisation. I find that staff meetings are incredibly effective at breaking down these mental divides. The fact that everyone knows about what other team members are working on also opens the possibility of more synergies and joint work.

Create strong connections among team members

People are critical to the success of any organisation. Your results will be as good as your team is.

One of your main roles as a team leader is to coordinate and motivate talented individuals to achieve results as a group. That’s not an easy task, nor something you can do on your own. The dynamics of a team are unique and often spontaneous. What you can do to build a stronger team is to create opportunities for connection beyond the professional setting.

You can try starting staff meetings with informal conversations that allow your team members to know more about each other. Successful companies, like Google, excel at this. At Google, they start meetings with a trip report from anyone that went somewhere over the weekend. I used to ask everyone what they did over the weekend and how things were going, for example.

Choose what works for you. If you're thinking this is not important, I assure you that, in my experience, it completely changes the tone of the meeting for the better. When you know someone personally, there are more opportunities for fruitful interaction and collaborative work.

Use certain dates as an excuse to get to know your team better and for them to know each other more. My personal favourite is to celebrate birthdays together. I also liked to organise group activities around special dates like Christmas. When possible, having breakfast or lunch together also opens up a space for interaction and socialisation.

Personal connections strengthen the team and the potential of what they can achieve together. Remember, it's easier to work with someone you like and trust. — Sandra Naranjo Bautista

A version of this article was first published by Better Govs.

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