Can an online meeting be as effective as an offline meeting? How to avoid useless generations and forget meetings? Tips for effective communication are shared in this article.
The Importance of Running Effective Meetings
A huge part of the time in teamwork is occupied by meetings between team members and other specialists. Most of your communication in the workplace will take place in face-to-face or online meetings, including various sessions, meetings, discussions, and gatherings, so your professional performance will largely depend on your skills in organizing and conducting such events. Well-organized meetings can help a company find solutions, develop ideas, and identify new opportunities. Meetings can be a great way to build a team through social interaction experiences. However, meetings can also be a waste of time if not planned and managed. You can ensure productive meetings with careful pre-preparation, effective meeting management, and judicious use of your communication skills.
How to Run Meetings Effectively with 5 Useful Tips?
1. Give the floor to every participant.
At the beginning of the meeting, it will be helpful to give the floor to each participant. A short message from everyone is enough. For example, by putting a specific topic on the agenda, you can ask employees if they have ever encountered such a thing. You can simply ask to share the most interesting or important event from the last week. This will help to get the participants involved in the process right away.
2. An agenda is a tool for preparing effective meetings and meetings.
The agenda reflects the purpose of the meeting and the list of items to be discussed. It is sent to the participants no later than one day before the meeting. An important block is to talk about something informal at the start, to be interested in how your colleagues are doing. This allows the participants to switch from their work contexts to the general ones, creating a single space for communication. And I will emphasize separately: it is important that everyone’s voice be heard. That is, the thrown-in question “how are you?” with nods from the participants and a couple of “normal” is not a warm-up.
3. Define a virtual room and establish and approve meeting rules.
In order to conduct effective and efficient meetings, clear rules of conduct are needed that will be clear to all participants. When you hold meetings online, this is even more important. When we know that rules are necessary, depending on the organizational culture or climate of the company, their types and how they are followed can change. This is why we recommend that each organization create its own rules.
4. Determine the purpose of the meeting.
Meetings can be held to exchange information, make decisions, or seek opportunities. Whatever your goal, state the outcome of the meeting you are striving for. For example, “we carefully evaluated all three product ideas and decided which one to invest in.” Use this expected result to guide the direction and content of the meeting.
5. Select attendees for the meeting.
The rule is simple: invite only those who really need to be involved in the process. There should be no unnecessary participants at the meeting. The more people participate in the meeting, the longer it will take you to reach a consensus. Meetings with more than 10-12 people can get unmanageable if you expect them all to participate in discussion and decision-making.