Operating your marketing team meetings with efficiency shows everyone that you respect their time and trust them to get the work done.  

In this video, we take a look at how to use your project management tool (in my case, Asana) to create a meeting agenda so that you don’t waste time making slides. Then we’ll use Slack to remind the team to keep the Agenda up to date so our meeting runs smoothly. 

Transcript:

In this video, I’m going to show you the easiest way to run a very efficient team meeting using Asana and Slack.

Whether you’re running an in person, hybrid, or completely remote team, having a weekly checkpoint where everyone gets together to get aligned is super important.

A good team meeting:

• has an agenda
• gets everyone aligned
• and doesn’t take too much time 

And that is where Asana and Slack come into the picture.

Now these two tools I love and have implemented on multiple teams over the years. There’s probably similar features in Monday, JIRA, etc.

In the end, the best project management tool is the one that everyone uses.

Create an Asana Project for your Meeting Agenda

The first thing you’re going to want to do is create an Asana project specifically for your weekly team sync. As you can see, I’ve created my project and I’ve added some sections for the things that we’re going to cover at every single team meet. So [00:01:00] general team news, I have a fill in your timesheets reminder where you guilt the people that haven’t done it yet. With recurring items like this, we’re going to talk about it every week. So it makes sense to set it as a recurring task by just setting it to repeat. And then that way, when we check it off, it’ll automatically regenerate for the next week.

So in this example, it’s a marketing team that produces a lot of content. So I have the content area, any big initiatives that we’re working on, and then a fun thing, which is something that I like to do, where one person from the team shares something, and each week we rotate through, so everyone gets to know each other a little bit better.

Now this board is empty, and even if you have a dedicated project manager, this is an opportunity to encourage your team to own the status of their work.

Have your team populate the meeting agenda

In Asana, one task can live in multiple projects. So what we’re going to do is ask the team members to make sure to tag [00:02:00] their work to the weekly meeting at the start of the week. Then, at the end of the week, we review the items and check off or update their status.

To do that, the team member just needs to go to their individual task, and when selecting what they’re doing that week, Add it to the weekly team meet project, and then choose the section where it should be discussed.

For a project manager working on a high level task… The process is exactly the same. Just add to project,

and select where it should be discussed.

Back here in our weekly team meet project, the items are getting added and are now building the agenda for our meeting. When it comes time to get together, you can share your screen or put it up on the projector, hide the sidebar, and then just use it as an agenda where you check off things, or click in, add a comment to update where it’s at, or fill in any additional descriptors that come about from the discussion.

It really couldn’t be any easier. And it eliminates the [00:03:00] pain and the time suck of creating slides just to present at a meeting.

Creating a meeting reminder in Slack

Now this system only works if everyone is disciplined enough to put their tasks into the weekly board and that’s where Slack comes in.

What you want to do is take the link for your Asana board, open up your Slack, and in the team channel, set a reminder, asking everyone to make sure the weekly meeting agenda is up to date. To do that, we just type /remind And then the syntax comes up for you.

So, in this case, we’re going to put it in General , and just add a little message With the link

“Hey everyone, please update the weekly board”, and then we’ll just paste the link on there, “with your tasks for this week", every Monday at 8. 45 AM.”

Slackbot gives me the thumbs up, and now that will happen every Monday, so there is no excuse for not being done when we get together at 9. 30.[00:04:00]

I’ve suggested and implemented this at multiple companies. And one thing that always comes up is what if the team members don’t do it? Now that is a fairly simple one. All you need to do is gently remind them that this is part of the job description and if they love that paycheck hitting their bank account, they’ll learn to love adding their tasks to the weekly meeting board.

And that’s pretty much it. As with all things project management related, discipline is the key to actually making this work, I usually spearhead this exercise and then once the team’s gone through it a few times hand off the responsibility of running the meeting to one or multiple people within the team so that they can do it and really own both the input and the output of these team sync’s.

If you found this helpful, please don’t forget to like and subscribe to this video. And if you have a question, just put it in the comments below.

If you’re interested in getting my professional help via my fractional CMO service to get your creative team up to [00:05:00] speed, feel free to go to my website via the link below and book time for us to chat.

Hope that helps and have a great day.