Get the Most from Your Business Meetings
Although many would like to do away with meetings, whether face to face meeting or a virtual meeting, they are an essential part of running your successful business. When getting the most from your meetings, they are one of the best ways for communicating with your staff and they with you. The trick is to get maximum leverage – get the most – from your meeting. Here are a few suggestions for making your meetings as effective as possible:
1. Develop an agenda and share it with anyone who will be attending the meetings. This gives others the opportunity to think critically about the items to be covered.
2. Provide a specific length of time for the meetings. This will help avoid the “when will this meeting end?” syndrome. Some mangers and executives are known to use timers very effectively for this.
3. Try to set the meeting under 30 minutes to be mindful of the average person’s attention span. Anything longer and there will be a lot of wasted “mind power.”
4. Develop a “parking lot” for off topic ideas or subjects. One nonprofit executive who depends on her staff continually coming up with novel ideas, assigns someone to record these spur of the moment ideas, either by taking notes or electronically recording meetings and retrieving the parking lot ideas once the meetings are transcribed. Any discussions of topic at the meeting is discouraged to avoid unnecessarily extending the meeting time.
5. Allow time for a summation of the meeting before its ending. Include assignments of responsibilities and make sure that everyone understands their assignments.
6. Share taking points with meeting participants so that any information about the meeting is controlled and consistent.
7. Immediately distribute the minutes from the meetings.
These are just a few suggestions to make your meetings more effective and productive. No one has the time to spend filling it with unproductive gatherings. Make the most of your meetings so that everyone has a sense of accomplishment and an understanding that their time is valuable and their input a necessity.
If you are in need of someone to quickly transcribe those meeting minutes, don’t forget that Exceptional Transcription and Business Solutions can help with those minutes and with other business needs.
Audrey Dixon is CEO and Founder of Exceptional Transcription and Business Solutions. She and her team are masters at accurately transcribing your audio meeting minutes, podcasts, seminars, etc. into written documents.
