Team members in project status meetings ?

Question

When conducting status meetings I feel they're inefficient.

About our meetings: They're once a week and they're in the morning at 9am. They were once at 3pm but the CEO finds it difficult to facilitate client meetings if they're in the afternoon.

Our meetings are intended to minimize interruptions and increase team interdepartmental communication.

I feel team leads should attend this meeting. I feel there isn't really a need to involve my other two development team members in this meeting.

Team leads should just funnel down information to their team and not have every team member present at the meeting.

They don't really need to know the gory details of what another team member is doing when the project is a single department project (about most of our projects are this) and don't depend on another department to execute the tasks.

Is this process more efficient with your experience or has it been more disruptive to team communication?

Update: Team size: 3 web developers, 2 SEO/marketing team members, our CEO and our office manager

Answer 1

Do a RACI analysis for your meeting. If you cannot classify a participant within this analysis, (s)he is not needed for that meeting. If a meeting is more than just uni-directional, it has been shown many times that the size of that meeting should not exceed six or seven people.

Since your team is small, however, I do not see the harm in including the entire team for the weekly meeting. Because it is such a small team, I would worry about the excluded members feeling, well, excluded. That would not occur if your team was large.

Answer 2

Based on the size of your team, I would say "Yes, everyone should be at the team meeting". Everyone should be up to speed with what is going on.

Answer 3

This one is hard to answer based on the size of your team. @Sloret is right in that everyone should be up to speed and @David is right in the fact that you have a team of 7 people and it could be easy for people who aren't included in the meeting to feel as though they are excluded.

My suggestion is look at the reason for the meeting. If it's about project progress and issues, having the whole team there can be useful. People need to see the bigger picture and this is an opportunity to share information.

If your meeting is really a status update with the sponsor, you need to get the information ahead of time and present it yourself. Only have a team member in the room when it's possible more detail will be needed.