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Do you conduct productive meetings ? Any business - big or small - need to conduct meetings every now and then either with its clients or employees.
Meetings are great ways to inform others about what's going on in the business and are great mediums to keep in touch. Unfortunately, many organizations waste precious time (and money!) simply because they do not know how to conduct productive meetings.
Indeed, haven't we all been in a meeting that seems to drag on... and at the end of it seems to have accomplished nothing? Well, don't let this happen to your business.
How to Hold Productive Meetings
First: Prepare an agenda and send out a copy of it to the meeting participants. This way, they can also prepare items they may wish to raise during the meeting.
Second: Schedule meetings in the morning. However, don't make it TOO early that participants are all still sleepy and as such act like zombies during the meeting. And never schedule meetings late in the afternoon as people will most likely be thinking of going home by then and will not give the meeting the attention it deserves.
Third: Make the meeting an interactive experience. Don't just TELL what people should do but ask them for their opinion too. This way, you are not just the manager bossing them around but one who actually listens to other people's ideas. If people are hesitant to participate, call them by name. Sometimes, all one needs is a little push.
Fourth: At the end of the meeting, sum up what has been discussed AND if tasks or assignments were given out during the gathering, make a quick run-down of them so that the person responsible knows that the whole group knows about it.
Fifth: Lastly, send out a 'minutes of the meeting ' memo to all participants no more than 3 days after the meeting. This helps keep everybody on the same path as to what was discussed.
Productive meetings save you and other people a lot of time. So if ever you want to call a meeting to solve a problem or simply want to inform others what of what is going on in your business, heed the tips above.
Action Steps to Conducting Productive Meetings
- Create an agenda for the meeting and email this to all the meeting participants.
- Before the actual meeting, run the agenda through your mind and identify items that you need to emphasize, topics that need to be discussed with a specific meeting participant, subjects that need to results in deadlines, and more. You cannot remember everything so keeping notes coinciding with the items listed in your agenda is important.
Important Points to Conducting Productive Meetings
- Schedule meetings in the morning.
- Use meetings as way to inform people about what is going on with your business so that they feel involved.
- Send out an MOM (minutes of the meeting) soon after the gathering so that people are aware of what has transcribed and to remind them of certain tasks (if handed out during the meeting).
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