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Meeting Planning – Everything Your Parents Did Not Tell You About Effective Meetings
Meeting planning and an effective meeting are key to great communications in teams and yet the below simple and powerful strategies are often overlooked.
If you are here pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix to move your meetings from slow, boring and conflict struck happenings to efficient, powerful and meaningful gatherings, you can jump straight to end list at the end of this article where you have the quick version. To get more of the meat, more of the essence and lost of help to boost you there, take a chunk of your time and keeping reading below, it will be worth it.
Have you been there? Have you felt it? How the meeting is over and you are not quite sure what you accomplished?
To Meet or Not to Meet – What are the Questions?
Meetings can be a total waste of time or a powerful and productive communication tool that solve problems, stimulate ideas, promote team spirit and generate action. The results lie totally in how they are run. Organized and well-managed meetings will inevitably produce effective results. Whereas, meetings that are poorly managed lack purpose and focus are a total waste of an organization’s time and money.
From my observations working with hundreds of different companies, I have noticed that people seem to be meeting more, enjoying it less and frustrated that they have so little time to get their “real” work done. They talk about meetings as being a “necessary evil.” Research conducted by the Annenberg School of Communications at UCLA and the University of Minnesota’s Training & Development Research Center show that executives on average spend 40-50% of their working hours in meetings. The studies also point out that as much as 50% of meeting time is unproductive and that up to 25% is spent discussing irrelevant issues.
Meeting Planning: Location, Location, Location
Rotation
A smart organization will rotate its annual convention across the map. This strategy not only allows you to meet in all regions where your membership is based, but it also benefits membership growth and recruitment in addition to keeping the meeting fresh in terms of climate, attractions, time zones, and cost of attending.
Member Input
Effective Multi Cultural International Business Meetings
Of the many areas in international business where cultural differences manifest is in the corporate meeting room. International meetings are an area where differences in cultural values, etiquette, interpretations of professional conduct and corporate rules are at their most visible and challenging to control.
In international business meetings, cultural differences between professionals can and do clash. Although it can not always be avoided, the negative effects of cultural differences can be minimised with careful and effective planning, organisation and consideration prior to meetings.
The Meeting and Its Significance
A meeting is the most fundamental form or unit of interaction among humans. As humans have to constantly interact with other humans, meetings cannot be avoided. Hence, the meeting has become a part and parcel of our lives. Every meeting has an agenda, the raison d’etre for the meeting, which is entwined with the proposed topics of discussion of the meeting. Every meeting is attended by a certain number of attendees, is presided over by a chairperson. The minutes of a meeting represent everything that is discussed at the meeting. The minutes, in other words, are a record of the meeting proceedings. The date and time of a meeting are collectively known as the meeting schedule.