Running a Good Tool-Box Meeting - Part 1

1. What Are Tool-Box Meetings?

A few supervisors and managers have been holding successful tool-box meetings for many years, but now the secret is out. The reality is that they are easy to run and do have some very good results on a regular basis. The supervisor merely sits down somewhere at work (hence the name tool-box) and talks over work related issues with his or her employees. This then also allows people to tell the supervisor what is really going on with the job so that a two-way communication flow results. This is an informal process and so has advantages over more formal meetings where people often feel uncomfortable or don’t think the meeting has much to do with them.

Because we desperately need people to feel part of the business and to make a contribution then it is important that we find effective ways to provide and receive information – and tool-box meetings can be the answer!

2. Why Are Tool-Box Meetings Important?

1. Because they allow for two things which are quite critical to successful operations:
   1. They are the best way to give employees more information about the business, about what changes are occurring, how they are doing, what is going right, what is going wrong –both at the broader level and most importantly, at the local level.
   2. They are often the best way for management and supervisors to tap into the most precious information which employees have and which they are usually willing to share if only we ask them in the right way. All of us understand that the person doing the job knows just what is going wrong and what can be done to improve things and tool-box meetings can be the way to gather this information.
2. Tool-box meetings are also important because we now have the evidence that employees are interested in what is happening to the business they work in. That should be no surprise, but to us somehow it often is. Employees are interested in information about their jobs, changes that are going on locally, how they are doing, their own prospects for promotion, what training is available and so on. Most importantly, they want to hear about all of this from the person they would like to believe before anyone else – their immediate supervisor.

3. The Nuts and Bolts of Tool-Box Meetings

Over the years, a lot of supervisors have had a try at ‘having a meeting’ with their employees and many times these have been quite disastrous. Usually this has been because the nuts and bolts haven’t been right. There have been four things which have often gone wrong:

1. They've been held in the wrong place at the wrong time.

2. The supervisor didn’t have anything important to say and probably didn’t want to hold the meeting in the first place and that quickly shows.

3. The supervisor didn’t know how to run the meeting and it became an embarrassing shambles.

4. The employees had been through these sorts of meetings before and thought they were a waste of time. They had offered ideas before but nothing happened, so why bother?