Ahh, meetings. Meetings seem to be something which you either love if you like wasting time, or you hate because you have a lot of things to be working on in your workday. A meeting will often be about a simple topic but after chatting for 10 minutes you will end up chatting about a lot of different things instead. To ensure that your team meetings can be as productive as possible as we approach the end of the year, here are some easy tips and tricks.
Send out an email before
Make sure that you aren’t one of those people who look at everyone’s calendar and slots yourself in for a meeting without saying a word. This will likely annoy your colleagues, especially if that time was meant for quiet working, and it doesn’t set a good tone for the meeting. Make sure to send out an email a few days before to ask everyone the best time for them to meet. Let them get back to you and this will make things less stressed.
Don’t let yourselves sit down
The easiest way to end up spending hours in a meeting room is sitting down in a comfy chair and being able to chat and stay warm. However if you want to make sure that a meeting goes quickly, you can use meeting room management to remove the chairs from the room and make sure that you have a strict time limit. People don’t want to stand up for a long while so this means they will want to cut to the chase and get it over with. The meeting will be half the time for the same outcome!
Have a clear plan
It is important when you set up a meeting in the diary that you have a clear plan and path to what you want to speak about. Make sure that with your confirmation email you send out an itinerary of subjects you need to discuss, and invite people to prepare their ideas and add anything else in if they need to.
Write notes
Make sure that when you are in a meeting you are writing everything down. You will have all come here for a reason and this is to discuss projects and come up with ideas, so it is important to make sure that you do this. Writing notes will allow you to remember every little thing and this can ultimately lead you to making a great decision for the company and making yourself incredibly successful.
Make sure everyone has a chance to speak
If you have invited a certain group of people into a meeting it must be because you value what they have to say. Make sure everyone in the room has a chance to speak and voice their ideas because it can often be the shy ones who are overlooked who have the best ideas of them all. Take turns going around the circle and make sure that everyone has the chance to stay what they want to say.
- This post has been written for Morning Business Chat by an outside source.
