3-5-7 Meeting Format for Weekly Staff Meetings

If you are the manager of a team of people at your job, here is a format we suggest for running your staff meetings. We call it the 3-5-7 format because of its convention of giving 3 to 5 minutes per person to answer 7 questions. This system assumes that you have fewer than ten direct reports so that you can complete such a staff meeting in under one hour.

The purpose of a staff meeting need not be to get status reports. If you have excellent collaboration tools at work where statuses, issues and risks are already documented, that’s preferable. Some companies like Automattic (WordPress) make great use of internal blogs for communication. However, face-to-face meetings are continue to be useful because our brains have evolved being wired for being most effective in face-to-face conversations for several things.

An in-person (or via video conference) discussion structured around these questions is likely to be effective in finding solutions, building a more collaborative team and keeping everyone on the same page.

Here are the seven questions we suggest you request each attendee to come prepared to answer.

1. What did we (you and the team reporting in to you) do over the past week?
2. What did you learn over the past week?
3. What do we (you and the team reporting in to you) plan to do over the next week?
4. What issues are we (you and the team reporting in to you) facing now or are likely to face in the future?
5. What do you suggest are our countermeasures to address those issues?
6. What do you need help with from the rest of us in this meeting?
7. Is there anything non-work-related that you’d like to share?

Each person may answer the seven questions the order of their choice and may also combine the answers to multiple questions. The only requirement is that all seven areas be answered in a focused, efficient, and effective narrative lasting between three to five minutes.

Some of this advice is based on management experiences shared by Don Kiefer in an operations management class he teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Business.