Virtual team meetings can be terrible for everyone involved when not planned properly. We even often hear that meetings are a waste of time. But is that true? Meetings and conferences are supposed to be helpful for teams to stay connected and improve productivity. These are necessary activities to keep everyone on the same page.
In this video, I'm sharing my top tips for running a remote team conference.
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Transcription:
Are you interested to know what it actually takes to run a team of over 50 employees who all work from home. In this video, I'm going to cover how we structure the agenda of our remote team conference, which we do a couple of times a year. And due to the current global situation we're in, we've been running leads remotely rather than in person where they were previously happening in person now having remotely so if you're interested to learn all about that, don't go anywhere. If you don't know us, my name is Pete Moriarty and our business it genius helps small and medium sized business owners with technology and business strategy. And we really believe in business owners scaling their businesses, so they can have more freedom, and more time to do the things they love. And the kind of metric for that is, we want help businesses get to around about the 20 employee mark. Because what I know from going through that journey in that process myself is once you're there, that's about the time where the founder can start to step back, have some more time freedom, and still be involved in the business, but be in business in the way that most entrepreneurs dream of having the flexibility to live and work and be where and when you want to be, but still have a successful business, paying your income and taking care of living expenses. Now, the most important tool that we use to support business owners is their growth roadmap. And you'll find playlists on our YouTube channel, which take you through the different strategies for different stages of business that we'd recommend for your technology. We know that if you're just starting, you don't have any employees, you probably don't need a fancy dashboard with all of your business numbers sitting on a TV somewhere in your office. But if you're a growing business, and you've got five or 10, or 15 people in the company, and by then you want to start building a sales team, that's the time to implement a CRM system. So if you check out some of our playlists and videos, for the different stages of business in the growth roadmap, you'll get an idea of what we recommend you focus on for your technology and business strategy, based on exactly where you're at. Now, let's talk about our recurring remote conference. And this is what we run to give everyone basically a sense of connection, that the business is going to work together cohesively. Now, we used to do these in person, unfortunately, we haven't been able to do them for nearly two years now. And so I missed hanging out with the team. And what we used to do is fly everyone into the same city, have a great time together, have a few drinks, have some social time, and then do some business planning as well. But we now do these remote and the overall idea or the overall aim is to basically get everybody together in one place, and then plan out where we're going for the year or for what we call the season. Now rather than planning quarterly, which we used to do when we were in the startup and the growth phases of business. And now that we're really very much in the scale phase of business. For us, we do a season every four months. And so we'll have three periods during the year for our strategic planning. But if you're an early stage business, and you've got less than 20 employees, you probably want to do this quarterly just to keep the momentum going in business. And really the reason that we do these is to have a bit of a like a, you know, a waypoint or a stopgap or a milestone to kind of check in with how the business is going. Now you're going to have an annual plan for the business or hopefully you have an annual plan for the business, which for me, I do that every financial year. And that's basically where I see the business going vision wise in the next 12 months. And then for us what trickles down from that is what are we going to work on each quarter or in our case each season. And so ideally, we want to have that set in stone. First, we want to have the five to 10 year big vision, big impact plan for the business. That trickles down into what do we want to achieve for the next 12 months. And from there, it's into the season or into the quarters. Now, before we get into the actual conference of connecting with the team, I like to get a bit of a taste for what the team are interested to know what the team is interested to learn. And if there any particular concerns that the team have going into the conference going into the time that we spend together, because we're going to spend three to four to five days together as a team. Sometimes they're a short one, only two days, but once a year, we do a more extended one. And in that time, we're going to spend a lot of time together. And I want to make sure that time is productive. And so we asked for feedback from the team of what are you looking forward to at our upcoming conference, we send them a Google survey and we ask what kind of things are in your mind right now? What things do you need to learn? How do you think we could improve the company? What would you like to know from your leaders? What would you like to change about how we're doing things right now? What do you think the team needs to be successful? What do you think our customers need to be successful? And all of those questions are basically made available to our team so that we can architect a conference and a team get together, which is going to be not only productive for our team members, but the best suited for the impact that we want to have and for our customers as well. Now, if you're interested in a template on that, and the kind of questions that we actually ask our team, we have a template available if you are taking up our Transfer In offer. So on the link below this video, there's an offer to transfer in and get access to exclusive content from mighty genius doesn't cost you anything. But if you jump onto that, you'll get a link to the actual survey that we send to our team. And you can get an idea of how to run that yourself. Now once we've got this Done, we then will work with our team members. And in our case, it's now middle managers. But previously, it was all of the leadership team in the business, who will architect and lead presentations to the team. Now, previously, we did a lot of workshops and the workshops would be a matter of bringing the team together to learn something, and there would be kind of delivered in a training format, right. And they were useful. But over time, we found that the attention for those kind of waned a little bit. And what's even more impactful is interactive working with the team. And so what that means is that most of our presentations now, rather than just presenting are actually something that we're collaborating with the team, we're using the breakouts feature of Google Meet to send people into breakout rooms and do activities, we use things like Google jam board to actually, you know, if it's drawing, if it's building out a story, if it's doing an activity together, we want the team to be collaborating as much as possible, because that's going to be a much more effective way of keeping them engaged. And so we've got some ideas on that, and some other extended videos on how we use Google jam board inside our classroom. So for those that take up the transfer in offer, you'll get access to some extended resources. Now, as well as the managers actually presenting and running those, what we then do is we have the executives of the business join in the activities and the workshops. Now what I really love about that is it actually gives bonding time between the execs and the individual team members in a business. If you've got a layer of middle management in a business, which now that we're very much a scaled business we do, it's really important to have that bonding time between the executive everyone in the business because as an executive myself, I'm going to learn from the frontline workers in the business. And overall, I know for culture, it's really good for everyone to feel as one and know, you know, even though you're not working with someone day to day, if you can collaborate on a silly drawing on a jam board together for an activity, then that's going to be something that's going to allow that that bonding to come in. Now remember, this is all being done remotely rather than in person, if we were in person catch up, then we'd be having a beer together, or we'd be sitting down playing cards at a table or we'll be swimming in a pool or doing something fun, you know. So trying to create that sense of togetherness in a remote environment, doing activities together is a really great way of doing that. So I want to share some examples of what we actually did as workshops, and what we actually shared with our team based on the responses that our team shared with us from our last season or catch up. So some of the things that we covered in our workshops were around leadership. And so that was a mix of some activities, and also developing self leadership. I think leadership is one of those things where, you know, you can go with a very fluffy presentation with nice slide backgrounds, and motivational quotes and those kinds of things. But what's more interesting to me is actually developing and creating activities to teach the team about self leadership that will actually then, you know, reverberate through into leadership in the business and leadership in how they show up with work. And I don't think necessarily leadership training is just for someone who's in a position of authority of leadership in a business or hierarchy. Leadership Training is really for everyone, because self leadership creates performance right across the board. So secondly, what we talked about what we created activities around were strategic thinking, and this is more on the execution side of the business, but also empowering the team, that it's everyone's responsibility to be a part of the strategy of the business, and a part of the execution of the business. So my general manager, Scott did a lot of the work around this, as well as some of our other leaders as well. And that was really about how can the team feel like they are a part of the strategy of the business and not, you know, try and break down the culture of a business being about what the executives say, and just trickling that right down throughout the organization. One thing that's really important for me in our culture, is that everyone feels that they have a say in the business, and that everyone actually does not just feels but actually does have a say in the business. And for that, we want to give everyone a few tools around what how do we think strategically, not just, you know, the basics of Hey, everyone should be paid more money, or, hey, we should have more holidays or, you know, simplistic thinking like that. But what can actually improve the business and bring everyone's ideas to the table. Thirdly, we did a session on mental health. And this was really important considering a lot of our team are based in the Philippines who have been on lockdown for most of the year of 2020. So for us, it was really important to have dialogue around recognizing how our mental awareness and our own mental state can come into the workplace, but also just recognizing like, you know, what's going on outside the workplace as well. And whether or not we need support, whether or not we need to lean on each other or work with each other to make sure that we are looked after there and well supported. And so we went through a framework, which here in Australia is called Are you okay? Are you okay? And that framework is really about recognizing when someone in your life may be exhibiting changing behavior, and there might be something going on for them and a mission to reach out in a way that is supportive and check in on that person. Finally, one of the last ones that we covered was resilience, and that's again, you know, in the current situation that we're in, with many people feeling isolated and work At home, not being connected to their team members as not being able to connect with each other in an actual physical space together, having a bit of training and a bit of education around how we can build resilience within ourselves. And very importantly, how we can care for ourselves really well. So that we can develop resilience through actually caring for ourselves was a big part of it as well. So throughout the whole conference, we had a number of icebreakers and games and fun activities that were in between the sessions. And that really kept it interesting and engaging and kept the energy up. Each day, we started with a CI Gong practice from Scott, which was really awesome. And what that did was got us into our bodies, and got us mentally switched on for the day, it's important to break the mold of team members just showing up in work mode to a conference, because a conference is very different kind of thinking. It's about connection engagement, it's about strategic thinking, rather than just churning out the day to day work. So try to break the mold of what a normal workday would look like it was really important in how we did it. So I've shared some of the agenda of our team conference and how we actually plan that out. If you've got questions about it, drop them down in the comments, and I'll do my best to answer. Now, if you decide to take up our transfer in offer, which is linked down below. And then you get access to our remote work playbook, which is an eight week webinar series, all about how we run our remote company. Now we've got over $5 million in revenue, we've got over 50 people in the business. We are a large business, and we've scaled from nothing. I started this business with just myself, basically 15 years ago of growth and growth and growth. And we've outlined exactly how we run a remote business, which we've done for over six years now, with people all over the world. And we've shared that with you for no extra cost is absolutely free, you can jump onto that by clicking on the transfer in offer below. If you liked this video, please be sure to subscribe, share it with a friend and hit the like button. If you love the content. I'd really love to get your feedback on what you thought. Now if you haven't already checked out our offer this quarter on copper CRM, it's a good time to have a look at that if you're interested in building more cohesion with your team, and better delivery of how your business works. Using a technology based CRM, which uses AI automations and deep integration into the Google workspace ecosystem will allow you and your team to deliver much better to your customers, no matter where you are based in the world or how you're working right now. If you're interested in that offer, jump on the copper link down below and we'll see you on the next page. If not, I'll catch you in the next video.
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