Tips to have the perfect meeting
Meetings, everyone dreads going to them, but they’re important to have so you can make sure everybody on your team are all on the same page. Sometimes you’ll have to pitch a new idea to your colleagues, and other times you need to work out a kink in your company that can’t be changed just with an email.
Even though meetings have the air of being boring and stuffy, they’re necessary and very important. Here are some tips to have the best meetings.
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Make Sure You Really Need a Meeting
Meetings have been the norm in the business world for quite a few decades now, that it seems as if you don’t have a meeting at all you’re doing business all wrong. There are plenty of times that conducting a meeting is important, and very beneficial to the company. But, there are times where you might be able to re-evaluate if it’s actually necessary to have a business meeting. You should ask yourself:
- Can I send out a group email to my team for this topic?
- Does every person on the team need to be at this meeting?
- Could I have my team members email me updates on this particular topic?
If you ask yourself these questions, you may be able to forgo a meeting where everybody might not be fully involved and will save you future headaches.
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Keep it small
If you want to put a meeting together, keeping the head count to small handful of people will make the meeting a bigger success. Simply being, the more people there are in the meeting, the smaller the chance of everybody participating in the meeting. If the group in the meeting is larger, people will feel less pressured to participate and just ignore the meeting all together. If you have small meeting of five to six people, then you can insure that everybody will be able to participate on the topic at hand.
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Set an Agenda
This may seem like a redundant point on this list, but if you don’t set an agenda for the meeting you’re likely to lose everybody’s interest in the meeting and have one of those dreaded forever meetings. Having an agenda for the meeting will keep everybody focused, on track, and more importantly on time. You don’t want an hour long meeting to extend past the hour mark because you’ll lose the concentration of your team and they won’t be productive after. Sticking to a set agenda, you’ll be able to keep the meeting going at the pace you want and to make sure that everybody is on the same page.
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Pick a location
The location of your meeting is vital to how well your meeting will go. If you only have to tell your team something small about their current project, you can pick a more informal place around the office or even outside the office. Meetings don’t have to always be held in conference rooms. You may want to get some fresh air and sit outside, or have a quick meeting standing up around your desk or one of your team members desk. Conducting your meetings in places other than a conference room can yield better results than being in the same stuffy room all the time.
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End the meeting with an action plan
Make sure that your meetings come to end with everybody having some task to do after. This will ensure that everybody at the meeting stays on target with your goals, and also will make you a better leader. Everybody knowing that they have some task assigned to them after the meeting will help your team finish their goals and keep everybody focused.
