3 Team Meeting Ideas to Uplift Your Staff

Feeling like your weekly or monthly team meetings are in need of a little uplift?

We’ve all been there!

It’s easy for staff meetings to get off track. Maybe it feels too rushed. Maybe your staff is less than excited about them. Or maybe they dart off into a thousand directions and it becomes a “reign it in” session.

Whatever you’re dealing with, we’ve got your back! We’ve been hard at work trying to perfect our own weekly meetings and monthly meetings and have some ideas to share.

3 Team Meeting Ideas to Uplift Your Staff

Let’s jump into three ways you can help your staff feel supported, uplifted, and ready for a great week or month ahead!

1. Weekly Moment of Gratitude

The first weekly team meeting idea is to start your meeting off on a positive note is with a moment of gratitude.

Here at PCS, we LOVE our moment of gratitude and use this specific exercise in our own weekly meetings.

Here’s how it works:

• Whoever is leading the meeting starts by selecting a person to share their moment of gratitude first.
• The moment of gratitude can be work-related or related to something that happened outside of work.
• The person sharing will say something like “Today I am grateful for Sandy! She really helped me out last week and I appreciate the way that she stepped in and helped the birthday party on Saturday to run so smoothly. I saw her helping a customer struggling with too many bags—she just jumped right in, scooped up the bags, and helped the customer get to her car. The look on that customer’s face! They were so relieved! Sandy’s helpfulness really encouraged me to finish the day out strong, so I am really grateful.”
• Once an employee has finished sharing their moment of gratitude, they will then choose the next person who will take a turn.

It’s a very simple exercise but makes a huge difference! We start our weekly team meeting off with a moment of gratitude before diving into our review of the previous week.

A few little tips to help as you get started with this exercise: be sure to model what you’re looking to achieve.

The first week you institute this exercise, go first to model how you’d like your moment of gratitude to go. Then, choose another more senior employee that will continue to model that behavior. While this might sound silly, sometimes it takes a few examples before the team gets a hang of the activity.

As a note of caution, be sure to pull the reigns back if someone diverges off of the activity. If an employee says they don’t have anything they’re grateful for this week, they might need a little encouragement themselves! Take a moment to let them know that the whole team appreciates them. Then, in private, seek to learn more about their situation.

You’ll also want to be cautious about staff members that ramble or use it as a moment to talk about each detail of their weekend. If you have a large staff, you might limit each person to a specific amount of time.

2. Monthly Uplift Moment

Now that we’ve got your weekly meeting uplifted, it’s time to spruce up the monthly meeting!

The best part about this team meeting idea is that we already created the content to help!

A few months back we started sharing a video series on our YouTube page called “Uplift.” The videos are short, 1 to 1 ½ minute videos that include thoughts and quotes to inspire and motivate.

Our intention when we created this series was to shine light in an uncertain world. And we’d love to continue doing that by inviting you to use this series as an exercise during your monthly team meeting!

Here’s how it works:

• Select a video of your choice from our Uplift playlist.
• Play the video during your monthly team meeting.
• After the video ends, ask your staff a specific question or share their thoughts on the topic in the video.
• Encourage participation by offering your own thoughts first and how you’re going to apply the quotes in the video to the month ahead.

Remember, change can be difficult, so give your staff grace and patience as you get started with this activity.

Here are some quick links to a few of the videos to help you get started:

1. Uplift: Embracing an Attitude of Gratitude
2. Uplift: The Power of Persistence
3. Uplift: Planning to Pivot
4. Uplift: Positive Thinking
5. Uplift: The Power of Choice
6. Uplift: Overcoming Head Trash
7. Uplift: Intentional Living

Have fun with this and enjoy watching your staff shift to a more positive mindset as you continue with this exercise!

3. Monthly Recognition

If you’re already doing an “employee of the month” type of recognition, way to go! You’re well on your way to showing appreciation to your staff.

If you don’t currently have some form of staff recognition, that’s okay too. There’s no time like the present!

Here at PCS, we instituted two recognition moments within our monthly meeting to encourage and uplift our staff.

Core Value Recognition

Our core values are not just something we wrote down one day and never looked at again. No, quite the opposite! We live our PCS Core Values every day!

In fact, after kicking off our monthly meeting, we roll into recognizing staff members that went above and beyond and represented our PCS Core Values.

Curious about our PCS Core Values? We’re happy to share them with you!

PCS Core Values

1. Be a creative problem solver
2. Cultivate a growth mindset
3. Be obsessed over customer success
4. Foster a sense of connection and belonging
5. Practice self-responsibility
6. Build trust one interaction at a time
7. Keep it positive, keep it humble

Here’s how it works:

• Each month, we ping our employees via email with an internal form that we created. On the page for the form, it says: “See or experience someone do something that exemplifies our Core Values here at PCS? Let us know! Be sure to name the PCS Core Value and share your story with us.”
• The employee then uses the form to select another employee’s name, the PCS Core Value number, and an open text box to write some more detail about their experience with that co-worker.
• Our management team collects the responses and adds the employee's photo and the comment from the co-worker to our monthly slide deck.
• During our monthly meeting, we go through each person who was recognized and read off the comment from their co-worker!

This activity helps breathe life into our company’s core values, and we’d love to encourage you to try it too!

Team Member of the Month Recognition

We want our team members to feel appreciated for the hard work that they do, and I’m sure you feel the same about your team.

For team member of the month recognition, we created something unique to us and I encourage you to work with your own team to create something that’s unique for you.

We call ours the “PC Power-Up Award” and here’s how it works:

• Using the same email and same form mentioned above for the PCS Core Values, we ping our employees.
• After they’ve made a selection for the PCS Core Values, there is an additional option on the form for them to nominate someone to receive the ultimate recognition: the “PC Power-Up Award.”
• Our monthly award is similar to "employee of the month" where we’re recognizing someone for going above and beyond the call of duty.
• Once submissions are made, our leadership team reviews the submissions and ultimately chooses who will receive this award for the given month.
• Our management team then uses Canva to create a certificate (click here for a special deal on Canva pro!) and adds it to our monthly meeting slide deck.
• During our monthly meeting, we announce the winner and celebrate them!
• After the meeting, we send them a copy of the certificate (so they can hang it!) and we add it to our “Hall of Fame” in our company PlayBook.

Our staff loves video games, especially Mario, so we themed our award using different “Power-Ups” depending on the person and achievements recognized. But be creative! Talk with your team and work together to build something that will be meaningful and encouraging to them.

Keep Us Posted!

We are thrilled to share the team meeting ideas in this article with you and can’t wait to hear more about how it helps to transform and uplift your team.

Please leave us a comment below with what you discover!

If you’re looking for more ideas on how to keep your staff motivated or how to overcome adversity, don’t forget to grab a copy of our guide Overcoming Adversity & Negative Self-Talk: Ways to Persevere Even in the Most Difficult Times.