How to Improve Business Meeting Productivity & Effectivness
Companies have business meetings where several employees are gathered together in a room to discuss a plan or issue. Meetings need to be productive and effective since time is diverted from employees' schedules to accommodate the meeting. Being aware of the importance of business meeting productivity will help you consciously strive towards making your company meetings work for your team.
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Things You'll Need
- Video conference equipment
- Agenda
- Information about the meeting's moderator
- Action plan
- Progress sheet
Instructions
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Use technology by setting up a video conference meeting. Your office may have offices in different cities, and instead of flying every team member to the office where the meeting will be held, you can have a video conference meeting over the Web. This can save the company money, as well a time, since employees can work immediately to implement the plans discussed in the meeting instead of having to fly back to their offices.
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Create an agenda. An agenda helps focus the meeting on key topics. Sometimes during meetings, discussions can go off on tangents and discussions may be irrelevant to the initial purpose of the meeting. An agenda serves as a plan or structure that will alert the employees in the meeting on what topics will be discussed. This will ensure that key topics will be covered and that the meeting will be productive and effective.
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Assign a meeting moderator. Depending on the nature of the meeting, this moderator may be the company leader or the leader of a project being discussed in the meeting. A moderator is important because he can set the tone during the meeting, direct the meeting towards a specific goal, as well as keep the discussion relevant as the meeting goes along. Also, the meeting moderator can announce requests such as turning off cellphones and avoiding chitchat between employees during meetings.
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Build an action plan during the meeting. This action plan should list a leader for the project as well as a deadline. Deadlines spur action because it makes team members accountable. It makes them more likely to accomplish the work when there's a set deadline in place. You may also set benchmarks before the deadline, which acts as mini deadlines that help move you forward toward the deadline.
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Evaluate the progress of the action plan in the next meeting. Evaluating the project's progress is important because it helps you see if goals and deadlines are being met. The evaluation process may include a list of things that have been accomplished so far, a list of concerns and challenges that the team may be facing, and additional tactics that the team can utilize to keep moving towards the goal.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit meeting image by Thorsten Frisch from Fotolia.com
