Meetings are used to determine lot of things about a firm/company. We make our major decisions at meetings, most of which are fixed to hold at regular intervals. Handling meetings badly, however, always have a negative effect. Some significant characteristics of bad meetings are lack of agenda and failure to stay within the assigned time. Experiences from a poorly organised meeting cause a lot of people to shy away from the idea. To avoid the bitter experience created by bad meetings, certain people propose innovative ways instead of personal contact.
The advent of technologies such as instant messaging, conferencing and other media have changed the idea of how people meet. Some set of people look for ways to implement these new systems and eliminate all the obvious reasons for a bad meeting.
Meetings are of great benefit to businesses, some advantages of physical meetings are;
Building Team Spirit.
Formal meetings are a great way to build togetherness and a strong team spirit within workers in any organisation. Regardless of the type of meeting, it brings workers close to each other, which then encourages a series of team building activities between them.
Harnessing Collective Brainpower.
Meetings usually bring members of an organisation together for deliberations and decision-making, which is a great benefit to the organisation. It takes the decision making burden off just one or two people, and creates opportunities for everyone to share their opinions.
Enhancing the exchange of information in real-time.
Instead of waiting for a long period before getting responses and feedbacks, meetings allow all members to share information instantly. The entire process is simplified, and everyone hears the message at the same time.
Tips for conducting a successful meeting
How do you conduct a meeting which is entirely free of any bad experience? Here are some things you can do ;
Decide, why you meet.
The success of your meeting is largely dependent on the pre-meeting plans, this is where you decide why you want to call for a meeting. Some reasons to call for a meeting are ; To tackle a tough problem, To make decisions, To put a plan together and To launch a project.
Try to keep meetings short.
Not everyone is comfortable with lengthy meetings, most like it short and impactful. A meeting slated to last for multiple hours could discourage attendance, and lose its purpose midway. The attention-span will be short and things will get boring quickly. Elon Musk, a popular Techpreneur suggested that meetings should be kept as short as possible and not exceed 15 minutes, this largely depends on the type of meeting you want to call, some may be longer than 15 minutes.
Restrict meetings to the selected only
Don’t just go ahead and invite every member of staff to your meetings. Summoning only the workers concerned would make it more precise and professional. The more people at your meeting, the harder it is to control the proceedings of the meeting. So, try to keep things simple.
Make sure that the meeting reaches a definite conclusion
To keep things reasonable, the meeting has to have a definite conclusion. The outcome could be; to agree whether an action is needed or not and only discussions are enough, to approve time for a follow-up meeting and to create a list of possible actions or todos.
Have a facilitator
The role of a facilitator in any meeting cannot be neglected. A facilitator helps to ensure that the meeting does not exceed the allotted time and also monitors the contributions to keep the meeting on track.
A no-meeting culture brings discord among the workers in an organisation. It would not only affect the productivity of the organisation but would also lead to its disintegration. Take the right action now before it’s too late.
For more enquiries on how to develop a healthy meeting culture visit our site at: Timeqube.com
