Meeting tips – the 3 most important ones
If meetings have no structure, they become inefficient time wasters - and that costs a lot of money, as a report from Doodle shows. With our 3 meeting tips - three central basic rules - you can get the most out of meetings and ensure that participants leave the meeting room with a positive feeling.
At the end you will find a product that is perfect for you Use meeting rooms efficiently.
$541 billion. This is the breathtaking value of the resources that will be wasted in pointless meetings in 2019 (Source: Doodle, 2019). There are numerous tips and advice online on how meetings can be organized and conducted efficiently. If you look closely you can see that all the tips can ultimately be reduced to three core elements:
1. Create and announce an agenda list
It must be clear to all participants which topics should be discussed in the meeting. Therefore, keep track of the agenda and distribute the list to the various people in advance. This is the only way colleagues can prepare for the discussion, which will increase the quality of the meeting's content. To anchor the clear topic plan even better in the minds of meeting participants, you can provide a few printed copies or even hang it up in large format.
In this way, you prevent conversations from sailing away in any direction without a course or strategy. Of course, even with a clear agenda, topics can arise spontaneously. It is now up to you whether you want to allow this or not. In any case, with the agenda list you have a tool at hand to guide participants back to the topics on the agenda if you want to.
2. Set goals and stick to times
Arrange the agenda a fixed block of time within the meeting and formulate each of the individual sections a specific goal. Possible goals could be: “Identify the ten greatest sales potentials of 2019”, “Outline possible contents of the XY marketing campaign in a brainstorming session” or “Define procedures and responsibilities in the new offer process”. This gives your session a tangible goal of achieving a specific goal on specific topics within a set time frame. It is now almost obvious that you will take on an active role as meeting leader and moderate the discussions to a certain extent (or coordinate this with someone else). Keeping track of the clock is one of the central tasks here: Remind the meeting group about the progress of time and goal achievement.
3. Record results
Finally, tip number three: Record the results in a log and trust that the spice is in the brevity. The formulated goals serve as a success check: Have the sales potential been identified, are there content ideas for the marketing campaign and is it now clearly stated what the new offer process looks like? By creating and sending minutes, you strengthen the claim to a results-oriented meeting culture and “gather” all participants on a uniform information basis.
Meeting Tips – Here’s an extra tip
Implement small rules of the game to break out of classic patterns. For example, a “speech ball” could make the rounds during a meeting. Only those who have the ball in front of them are allowed to speak. Or all participants are provided with a blank “feedback card”. At the end of the meeting there is a five-minute window to fill it out and put it in a box.
Go to the “The State of Meeting Report 2019” by Doodle