Running a company successfully is clearly not an easy task. Maintaining a large infrastructure of employees, carrying out daily duties and outlining future initiatives can be daunting. But of course this doesn’t fall on one person, that’s what an employee hierarchy is for.

One way we make sense of the chaos is by dividing our companies into departments and teams, all with their own goals and workflow. These teams operate almost autonomously, each striving to hit their own unique measures. But how do they stay synced-up and on the same page? Team status meetings. Now, depending on where you’ve worked in the past, your opinion of a status meeting could be a bad joke, or an effective tool you wouldn’t know what to do without.

A recent study by Clarizen reportedly discovered that nearly 50 percent of workers consider status meetings a productivity-killing waste of time. But there currently isn’t really a clear alternative to the team status report. There are however variations in how meetings are run, which have effects on the productivity of these necessary conferences.

Here are a couple of ways to manage your time more efficiently and effectively engage your employees in a status meeting.

Daily Scrum

This is sometimes referred to as a daily “stand up” meeting. This form of status update is one of the most popular, as it is a quick (depending on the size of your team, likely to be less than fifteen minutes) and sensible way to update any need-to-know information to the relevant team members or personnel, as well as outline the tasks for the day ahead.

It’s a very simple process, everyone is in the conference room, or on the call, and you go around answering three very basic questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any roadblocks stopping you from completing this task?

The fast paced nature of the daily scrum style meeting focuses on progress and what people are actually working on for the day. It allows the entire team to be aware of what others on the team are tackling and helps with holding each other accountable for the plan going forward. These meetings should be kept brief and filled with pertinent information only.

Weekly Status

The weekly status is a more formal approach, it’s about asking and answering questions regarding your progress, instead of listening to reports. Since it is a weekly meeting you have longer to prepare, yet, you’ll spend more time in the meeting during this style of status reporting. This is an accessible approach for companies with multiple remote teams working globally, as well as for more technical projects that require everyone to have a base knowledge about the many moving pieces involved.

Once a week at a predetermined time, all members of the team provide written status updates. During the meeting, everyone joins the call and reads the updates together. While having most of the people together sitting in silence while one person reads off their report might not be the most exciting way to status, it is an effective way to make sure everyone has heard how the other personnel are coming along in their own projects, as well as making sure everyone knows exactly how well they are doing.

After the initial read, there is five-minute period where anyone can ask questions about what they’ve read to help clear up any confusion.

Depending on the size of the team, a weekly status should take somewhere between 30-60 minutes.

Progress, Plans, and Problems

This style of status reporting is a combination of the above two processes. Everyone in the conference will create a written report of the following prompts:

1.)    Progress: The accomplishments made since the last meeting

2.)    Plans: Goals and objectives to achieve by the next reporting time

3.)    Problems: Tasks that cannot be completed because of blocks or dependencies

The difference between this format and the others might seem subtle, but they are important. The intent isn’t to inform the team on the day-to-day tasks at hand (making progress on content development or needing to download an add-in like LiveSlides license to make it easier to insert video into PowerPoint presentations, but rather the overarching bigger-picture duties that are more strategic in nature like major progress updates and checking in with key success metrics.

In each meeting, the group will walk through each update together, and since these meetings are less frequent than daily or weekly discussions, they can be longer and more thorough. This style should generally take about 40-90 minutes.

No matter what style you think is the fit for your purposes, any or all of these will greatly improve productivity within your organization.