How Weekly Collaboration Sessions Can Make Your Marketing Team More Creative and Effective

There’s no shortage of meetings in most workplaces. But let’s be honest, many of those meetings could have been an email.

But for our marketing team at Berry Insurance, one type of meeting in particular has proven invaluable. A while back, our marketing team wanted a better way to plan projects, stay aligned, and actually make progress on ideas that tend to get stuck in the “we should do that someday” category.

So we tried something simple: we blocked off one hour every week for a standing collaboration session and it became one of the most valuable tools for our productivity and creativity.

Want to see the same results for your team? In this article we will explain exactly how our weekly collaboration sessions work and how you can make them work for your team too.

Table of contents: 

• How we structure our collaboration sessions

• How we decide what to talk about
• How we stay on track
• How this changed our marketing results
• Tips to make collaboration sessions work for your team
• Get collaborating

How we structure our collaboration sessions:

Before we began holding these collaboration sessions, we brainstormed to come up with a structure that we thought would be the most effective for us. Depending on your specific team, industry, marketing strategy, etc., this could look different for every business, but this is what we landed on:

Every week, we have a standing 2p.m. block on the calendar. But here’s the thing: we don’t force the meeting if we don’t need it.

Each week, we decide:

• Do we have something worth collaborating on?
• Is there a project that would move faster with multiple brains involved?
• Do we need alignment on anything?

If the answer is no, we skip it. If the answer is yes, we use the time intentionally.

That flexibility keeps it from turning into “just another meeting” that feels forced just because it’s on the calendar.

How we decide what to talk about:

When we first started, we created a running list of topics we thought could be beneficial to talk about during these blocks of time. We check in on it often to see if any of the topics seem timely to discuss, but generally, our meeting topics tend to just come up spontaneously during the week.

An idea or issue comes up and we say “let’s do a collaboration session on that.”

Most often, we use this time for brainstorming and developing creative projects, especially videos. But it goes well beyond that.

Here’s a snapshot of the kinds of things we’ve worked on together:

• Fun video ideas (and the logistics behind them)
• Higher-priority articles that need clarity or direction
• Social media post ideas
• Revamping current materials such as our newsletters, brochures, YouTube thumbnails, etc.
• Updating internal tools like our 1:1 survey or organizational documents
• Ways to make meetings more efficient (yes, including this one)
• Areas where we can grow or expand
• Team bonding activities and company events

Again, these topics will vary from business to business and their specific needs, but these are some areas we found success.

How we stay on track:

One thing we learned quickly: give a group of creative, collaborative people an hour and they will absolutely use all of it … and then some.

Once we get inspired by an idea, it’s easy to go off track (and somehow we always end up talking about food.)

So we added one small constraint: an actual hourglass. When it starts, we focus on the topic, when it runs out, we wrap up.

The visual cue reminds us to stay focused, otherwise we know we’ll finish our meeting with an under-developed idea. Plus, it adds a little whimsy, and who doesn’t love that?

How this changed our marketing results:

We already knew our team produced great results when we worked together, yet the impact of these meetings still surprised us.

Not only did we get better organization and planning, but we also got better work.

Because here’s what we noticed in our sessions: Generally, one person throws out a rough idea. Someone else builds on it, someone refines it, and someone else spots a gap or an opportunity. By the end, we have a good idea of what our project will look like and feel confident in our plan for execution.

Tips to make collaboration sessions work for your team:

If you want to try this in your business, here are a few things that make a big difference:

• Keep a running idea list: Don’t rely on memory. Keep a shared list of topics, ideas, and projects to revisit when you need them.
• Don’t meet just to meet: Give your team permission to skip the session if there’s nothing worth discussing. That alone keeps the quality high.
• Focus on the right kinds of work: These type of meetings work best for brainstorming, problem-solving, creative planning, and strategic discussions. Save other discussions for other types of meetings.
• Add a time constraint: Whether it’s an hourglass, a timer, or a hard stop, a time limit helps retain focus.
• Let ideas build: Don’t shut ideas down or settle on them too quickly. The magic happens when you let ideas marinate and explore different options.
• Take notes: Make sure someone is documenting the good ideas so they don’t disappear the second the meeting ends.

Get collaborating:

If your team constantly has ideas that come up day to day then hit a dead end, these collaboration sessions could be a great way to bring them to life and make them better than you imagined.

Every single person on the Berry Insurance marketing team is incredibly talented and creative, but we can all admit that our best projects have been those that all four of us have had a hand in.

And the best part? These meetings don’t need to be complicated.

Just block the time, come up with the write topics, and see what happens when your team has the space to build something together.