Introduction
Weekly Heartbeat is a term coined at Pixel Dreams for our thrice-weekly all-hands meetings system, designed to keep our team working as one healthy organism. Because we are data-obsessed, the production and management of our Weekly Heartbeat fall under the jurisdiction of our Vital Analytics department, the team dedicated to tracking and reporting our team’s health and performance. We have used real data to optimize our team building and alignment meeting structure.
If done right, establishing your own Weekly Heartbeat will:
- Standardize your meetings: Team members will know to expect client and industry updates, company announcements, and acknowledgments.
- Keep teammates informed on a consistent and predictable schedule.
- Provide an opportunity to celebrate milestones and wins.
- Align and motivate the team, reinforcing the things that matter to your organization (culture, values, purpose, etc).
In this article, we’ll share with you how to get a strong pulse out of your Weekly Heartbeat. We’ll share best practices that we’ve developed over the decade-plus we’ve been doing them, and we’ll show you how we conduct these meetings within our team.
Best Practices
The Rhythm
We’ve found that meeting as a group three times a week is just right. One rendez-vous to start the first day of the week; a mid-week check-in and update; and one at the end of the last day of the week to wrap up. As more and more people take advantage of hybrid workplaces, these meetings have become the glue that holds our people together, instilling our organizations’ values, cultivating teamwork, and nurturing culture.
Topics
Your meetings should be tailored to their timing within the work week. For example:
Mondays should be about important news, setting goals, and galvanizing the team for a productive week ahead. You know you’re doing this right when team members have learned something new, and feel focused and energized.
Mid-week meetings are a great opportunity to check up on how everyone is doing, whether it’s the team as a whole or individually. But keep in mind, it’s mid-week, and the team will want to get back to work. Keep it fun and keep it short. You know you’re doing this right when team members don’t feel their focus has been derailed.
End-of-week meetings take place at the end of the day, the last item of business before the team goes home. This meeting is ideal for good news, celebrations, milestones, and acknowledgements. The key here is to congratulate the team on another great week. You know you’re doing this right when there’s laughter in the air, the time flies by, and people feel great about their accomplishments.
Style & Structure
Have one or two charismatic hosts who can keep the team engaged.
Hosts prepare each meeting. This could include research, slides, images, and videos to share, but thanks to a standardized framework (more on that later) this isn’t a heavy lift. Your team may decide to elect one person to take this on or employ a cast of rotating hosts (a benefit if, perhaps, you want to strengthen individual players’ ability to speak in front of groups).
Strike a balance between structure, spontaneity, and team participation.
Your host will have an itinerary to get through, but it’s important to stay flexible enough to make room for questions, comments, and jokes from the rest of the team. Team participation is key. Having structured opportunities for break-out rooms or talking points will keep people engaged.
Keep them organized.
We know too many meetings will decrease any organizations’ productivity, and that it has the opposite effect of bringing people together. So it’s crucial to have well-organized Heartbeat meetings, with clear goals, agendas, and itineraries. To do this, we use a digital dashboard system to guide the conversation and record important information. We provide a snapshot of how this looks at the end of this article.
Commit to the initiative.
Organizations that are serious about enjoying the many benefits these meetings provide need to commit, never skipping a beat (and thereby causing an arrhythmia). A productive workplace will always have something new to announce, communications from leaders, news from clients, and/or milestones and acknowledgements to celebrate.
Evolve the meetings over time to fit your culture and operations.
There’s no one, perfect approach. While we think it’s important to change things up from time to time, we caution against a new approach every week. Ideally, give yourself a few quarters before you implement an update. Sometimes great ideas take time to crystallize.
Make some meetings virtual, and others in person.
Monday and Wednesday morning meetings may be better suited to virtual gatherings, allowing people to take the call from their home offices. Since the goal of Friday’s meeting is celebration and acknowledgement, these are best attended in person, where team members can experience the live energy and mood.
Have a dashboard.
A dashboard provides the host and team a structure to guide them through meetings. A digital dashboard is also a way to track team effort and goals while documenting (easily searchable!) information that may influence future evolutions. Additionally, the dashboard becomes a cultural artifact, capturing moments in time.
You don’t need a Vital Analytics department, but you do need buy-in.
Our in-house analytics team is responsible for overseeing the information collected in our Weekly Heartbeat, but even a very small team can choose someone to lead this initiative with minimal weekly effort, if everyone is aligned on its importance and you use a system that suits the needs of your organization and team.
Leaders need to attend.
The behaviours of your leaders will signal what is and isn’t important to your team. If your leaders feel they’re too busy to attend, it will signal to the rest of the team that these meetings are optional and can be skipped. But we challenge any leader: What’s more important than team alignment?
How we do Weekly Heartbeats at PD
At Pixel Dreams, we’ve committed to Weekly Heartbeat meetings for over a decade. Over the years, we’ve evolved and changed the meeting cadence, style, length, and structure to meet our needs. We expect that you too, will customize your approach, depending on the size of your team, your goals, and your priorities. As a young company with a handful of employees, we used to hold our MMMs in a bagel shop in Toronto. Today, with a team of 45 colleagues in North America and abroad, we’d have to rent out that entire establishment (and we’d have a hard time justifying all those flights, too). Below, we share with you our approach, last updated and evolved in January 2025.
MMM (or Monday Morning Meetings)
If not Monday, the first day of the week
- At PD, we like the competitive advantage that comes with starting the work week a little bit early. We start the day at 8 am with our first meeting of the week.
- We host a virtual call on Mondays. The majority of the team is at the office, but will still join online. We use Google Meets.
- Our host begins with news and updates. Sometimes this is industry or client news, sometimes, it’s local or international news. The host asks the leaders if there are any important news or announcements. If so, that particular leader will take the reins.
- After news and updates, the host turns it over to our CEO (or another leader if the CEO is not present) to kick off the week with a talk. These short, 5-10-minute teachings touch on a variety of topics, from health and wealth to success principles and philosophies.
- Next, the host sends the participants to virtual breakout rooms of 5-8 people. This is a great opportunity for individual participation and an ideal time for leaders to curate the breakout groups to encourage greater sharing, strengthening bonds between teammates who don’t usually work together, or as a way of gently introducing newcomers to the wider team. Once inside the breakout room, a standard set of questions guides each participant. Our latest iteration is as follows:
- Quote of the week: Each team member shares a quote. It’s a great way to learn through bite-sized materials, and it hints at what’s going on in the teammate’s mind. Recent quotes include: “Always do what you’re afraid to do.”(Ralph Waldo Emerson); “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” (Maya Angelou); “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” (Alan Watts).
- Weekend summary: A quick way to catch up with teammates’s weekend happenings.
- Looking forward to: An opportunity to learn what’s exciting team members about the future.
- Anything on your mind: Here, teammates share what is taking up their mental space. It could be work-related, or even something personal like wanting to study for their driver’s examination. The clues gathered allow the broader team to accommodate and support each other.
- Sharing of goals: Team members are invited to contribute personal and professional goals, but only what they’re comfortable with. Some teammates will share more, and some less. That’s okay. This portion of Heartbeat meetings can have profoundly positive effects; we have seen again and again that when team members make themselves accountable to their goals they are far more likely to achieve them. Weekly goals at PD range from physical (number of minutes spent exercising) to intellectual (learning a language or reading) to experiential (having fun with loved ones). We’ve provided some examples of real goals team members have shared over the years at the end of this article.
- Review of the past week’s goals: In the spirit of “That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially,” this is an opportunity for teammates to assess their prior week’s goals. Leaders have a responsibility to set an exemplary standard here, doing their best to crush their goals.
- Host Introduction & News Update: 5-10 mins
- CEO (or Leadership) Talk: 5-15 mins
- Breakout Rooms: 10-20 mins
- We start the meeting at 9 am, online.
- Our host provides a brief update on relevant developments with our clients, industry, and reminders of upcoming events.
- At PD, we use Wednesday mornings as an opportunity to learn about the latest in AI news. We call it WednesdAI, and this portion of the meeting is hosted by our resident AI expert. We believe this initiative is so important we turned it into a weekly Wednesday morning news segment.
- Next, our host transitions the team back into the virtual breakout rooms they were in on Monday, and team members quickly review the health of their targeted goals. Your team has an opportunity (and duty) to encourage you, challenge you, and see how they can support you. A good example of this: a teammate who had too much work on her plate couldn’t see how she’d find the time to get to the gym. Hearing this, the team discussed strategies to lighten her load so she had time to meet her personal goals. Not only did this make a positive impact on the teammate’s personal life, it strengthened the bond between group members.
- Host Introduction & News Update: 5 mins
- WednesdAI video segment: 10 mins
- Breakout Rooms: 5-10 mins
- Friducation Events: Sometimes, we reserve a Friday afternoon for educational presentations from teammates or guest speakers. At PD, we call these Friducation Events, and they typically start between 2:30 and 3:30 pm, depending on the lineup of speakers.
- Weekly Wrap-up: Without a Friducation event, we’ll start at 4:30 pm, and finish between 5:00 and 5:15 pm. Weekly Wrap-ups are the icing and cherry on our weekly cake. Each person has an opportunity to speak, answering the question: Which team member(s) are you proud of and/or thankful for this week, and why? As our team grows, we plan to start a bit earlier.
- These meetings are a medley of jokes, laughter, celebration of milestones and wins, singing happy birthday, and, often, the experience of gratitude amongst team members. There’s never been a Weekly Wrap-up that didn’t end on a wonderfully positive note. Don’t use this time to make heavy or distressing announcements. Keep it light, positive, and uplifting. Give your teammates a reason to miss work.
- Friducation Events: 30-90 mins
- Host Introduction & News Update: 5-10 mins
- Shout-outs & Celebrations: 30-40 mins
- Exercise
- Lift Weights
- Run
- Meditate
- Journal & Tea
- Watch Star Trek
- Drink Water
- Drawing
- Yoga
- Sleep 8 hours
- In Bed by 10 pm
- No Snooze
- 1:1 Time with Loved One
- Write
- Play musical instrument
- Read
- Listen to Podcast episode
- Sing/Dance
- Take the Stairs
- Cold Plunge
Our current team is about 45 people. At any given time, we will have between 25-35 participants.
Total: 20 – 45 mins
Wednesday Mornings
Total: 20 – 25 mins
Friday End of Day (or last day of the week)
Total sans Friducation: 35-50 mins
Total with Friducation: 65 – 140 mins
Conclusion
Our Weekly Heartbeat is an investment, yes — but one that delivers real ROI by keeping our team aligned and in sync. Just as a steady heartbeat drives the flow of blood and oxygen through the body, our meetings sustain the knowledge and energy that keep us moving forward together. A team can function as a unified organism or as an array of disconnected limbs working in isolation. We all know which one leads to success.
Resources
Dashboard Example
Personal Goals Examples
The information in Heartbeat should be treated similarly to social media. Teammates should only share what they feel comfortable sharing. Below are a few weekly goals teammates have shared over the years.
