Your Team Talk agenda

The Team Talk which you deliver to your staff should be made up of two elements - the information contained in the core brief from VCEG (50% of your briefing) and a local brief with information relevant to your own area of work.

The core brief

Your manager will tell you about the core brief which will have been generated by VCEG. This core brief will contain items which may be of operational or strategic importance to the organisation as a whole.

You should deliver this information to your team as part of your Team Talk. Where possible you should try to make the information contained within the core brief as relevant to your team as possible. If the information in the core brief is not relevant to your area of work then just mention it but do not dwell on it.

The local brief

The majority of your team briefing should be made up of local information which is relevant to your team. Here are some pointers to get you thinking about the kind of things to include in your local brief.

A good way to think about your brief is to split it up into the four Ps:

TEAMBRIEF GUIDELINES

• People
  Promotions
  Appointments
  Retirements/leavers
  Visitors
  Success stories
  Changed locations/functions

• Points For Action
  New and ongoing projects/activities
  Special events
  Health and Safety issues
  Building works
  Work standards
  Upcoming deadlines

• Progress
  Figures, returns, numbers
  Marketing
  Success stories
  Quality issues
  Completed projects/activities

• Policy Issues
  Human Resources policies
  Student recruitment and retention policies
  Health and Safety policy

If after looking at the above points you really can’t think of much local information to share with your team then simply hold a shorter team briefing meeting. It’s better to deal with just one issue fully than speculate or waffle about several issues you don’t know much about.

Good news!

Don’t forget to include good news and achievements. Good news does exist – you just need to find it and communicate it!

Context

Briefers must always remember, and if necessary remind those that they are briefing, that the object of the exercise is to provide information and feedback questions, comments and suggestions to VCEG. Team Talk is not designed for consultation or negotiation.

Team Talk is also not the right place to conduct ‘collective discipline’.

Anticipating questions

Remember that your team brief is as much an opportunity for your team to ask questions as it is for you to give them information. When you’ve decided upon your list of items try to think about the kind of questions your team could ask. Put yourself in their shoes and try to anticipate their concerns. This will help you to prepare some answers in advance.

Remember that you will be delivering your brief face-to face, so you should give some thought to how you come across to your team.

Briefings should be fairly informal and by all means adopt an approach which best suits the culture and nature of your team. Even though you will have put some thought and effort into preparing your briefing, try not to script what you want to say - it will just come across as unnatural and you may be thrown off course if someone asks a question.  

What you should do however is make sure that the style of your briefing is pretty consistent so that staff come to know what to expect and what their role is in the briefing.

A typical briefing might look like this:

• Announce the beginning of the briefing
• Note taken of any absentees
• The briefer goes through the items on the brief – both core and local
• Questions arising out of the brief are asked and answered
• The briefer refers to any significant anticipated questions that have not been asked
• Make a note of any questions raised which you haven’t been able to answer and any comments or suggestions which can be fed back to VCEG
• Remind the group of the date of the next meeting

Points about your presentation style

Remember that you are addressing your own team so the Team Talk should be relaxed and reasonably informal.

Try to:

• Try to be clear – avoid unfamiliar technicalities, acronyms, names
• Be brief – don’t ramble, sometimes you should repeat the message to make sure it sinks in, but do it concisely
• Be Interesting – be interested! Use examples that the group will recognise
• In control – arrange the group so that you are its focus. Watch the reaction you are getting as you go along
• Positive – watch out for the habit of excessive apologising. It makes you appear nervous and it can give your staff the impression that you don’t really agree with decisions which have been made at a higher level.

Remember that as a manager it is your responsibility to communicate decisions to your team regardless of your own personal views, so don’t try to distance yourself from the brief. Wherever possible arm yourself with the reasons which lie behind the information you are giving out.

If you are a manager with a responsibility for delivering a Team Talk, as soon as you have completed the briefing there are some simple, but vital steps which you must take with regards to feedback and follow up.

These include:

Record of notes

If you have taken any notes during the briefing then file them appropriately. You can use the form to help you record anything that you feel is worth sharing. This may help you when you come to prepare your next Team Talk too.

What to do with feedback

All being well, your team should have given you some feedback and suggestions about the items you’ve been discussing. Make a note of the questions/ideas which came up at the meeting and put these with your briefing notes.

Complete the Feedback form (LINK). This is especially important if you were asked a question and couldn’t provide a full answer at the time.

Make a record of these questions and ensure that you follow them up and get back to the team. You should try to get back to your team with an answer within ten working days of the brief taking place. If your team briefings are to work successfully it’s essential that you get back to your team with answers to their questions, otherwise they may start to lose faith in the whole process.

Inform your line manager

It’s important that you give the feedback you receive to your line manager so that they can feed any points they feel are relevant back up the management chain to senior levels if appropriate.

It’s worth getting into the habit of using the feedback form to produce a short outline of any feedback which you can then deliver to your line manager soon after the briefing meeting so that the information is fresh in your mind. You can also share with your manager how you felt the briefing went and what the level of interest was.

Make sure you do your follow up quickly

If you do this simple follow up within an hour of two of the briefing it will take you perhaps ten minutes. If you leave it a week the chances are you won’t be able to do it at all!

Where to find the feedback

The key themes raised from the briefings and any responses to questions will be shared on the Team Talk Feedback and Outcomes page.

It’s important that the Team Talk system is monitored to ensure that it is working effectively. 

The Internal Communications team will carry out periodic research into the distribution and effectiveness of Team Talk. You can also provide your thoughts and suggestions on this cascade process by emailing intneralcommunications@beds.ac.uk.