30-Minute Toastmasters in Corporate Clubs

How can you accommodate members in corporate clubs that only get half an hour for lunch?

Corporate clubs and community clubs both have their own unique challenges. Corporate clubs have to be very strict on time; often, the meeting has to start 5 minutes after the hour and end 5 minutes before the hour to give people time to run down the hall from one meeting to the next–and of course, there are plenty of meetings scheduled during lunch, when corporate Toastmasters clubs typically meet.

To make matters worse, many employees, especially phone reps, are not allowed a full hour for lunch. In 30 minutes (or 35 or 40) they have to do everything they need to get done during lunch, including Toastmasters.

I encourage working with the management in this case; often individual managers have the prerogative to decide how to handle each individual case. It isn’t completely unheard of for a manager to allow at least some of the Toastmasters time to be on the clock; after all, it is communication and leadership training. Or perhaps the employee can make up those extra minutes to attend the full hour-long meeting. There are even corporate clubs that meet before or after work, although this is uncommon.

But I recently heard of a local corporate club with another solution: mini-meetings. If the Toastmaster has a half-hour lunch, have them give their speech and evaluation at the very beginning of the meeting, then proceed through the rest of the meeting, giving the chance to slip off when they must; or give them a table topic before doing anything else.

I would love to hear of a club that functions as two mini-meetings: open the meeting, speech, table topics, an evaluation, a second speech, a few more table topics, the second evaluation. This way you could work with people who have only half an hour for lunch, or perhaps people who have slightly different lunches (half the employees may have lunch from 11:45-12:45, others from 12-1) and then you can still be there for everyone.

Have you heard of any other clubs trying this approach?