Tips and Tricks
You know you need to have a meeting with all those stakeholders, and it sounds simple enough to just send out the meeting invite and wait for everyone to turn up.
But inside you’re dreading it because these meetings usually drag on for hours on end and with meetings being virtual these days you can’t afford for the attendees to lose interest.
You can run an effective meeting if you follow a few basic rules beforehand.
Agenda and Papers:
Set an agenda and email this out with any papers at least a week before the meeting is due (At a push 24 hours before the meeting). This enables participants to understand and know exactly what is going to be discussed and gives them information about these topics. It also enables them to come up with any questions they may have beforehand which speeds up the communication process during the meeting.
On the day preparation:
Arrive/Log in at least 10 minutes before the meeting starts. This enables you to sort out any technical issues and set up your materials or papers with markers for each section ready to go. The worst thing for participants is turning up to a meeting that is badly organised. They lose interest so fast you can almost hear the cringing going on in their heads and them wanting to log off or get out…fast!
Side conversations:
You know the ones. That starts when someone makes a funny comment and then everyone decides to suddenly have a chat about goodness knows what and your meeting is derailed. Nip it in the bud as soon as you can in a professional manner. This enables your meeting to stay on track and finish on time.
Opinions and ideas:
Everyone has them. Some people have a vast amount of experience and may decide the best outcome is not the one you thought about. For the love of goodness, don’t challenge the person, but you can challenge the idea itself that they have presented and try and guide them to your outcome and way of thinking. It’s a lot more respectable that way.
Follow up:
Send a follow up email within 24 hours of the meeting with a thank you to everyone for attending, summary of the meeting itself, any actions that need to be carried out, and giving participants the option to ask any further questions they may have. Follow this up with minutes of the meeting which enables you and the participants to have a record of the meeting and can be used as a basis for any follow up meetings you may need to have.
And this is where I come in. If you would rather focus on turning up to the meeting and discussing the important issues at hand and don’t want to deal with any of the above, I would be happy to take this all on for you – admin@gtva.co.uk (the clever alternative)