An Effective Meeting

In this post I am gonna talk about, how you can make a meeting that matters and creates an impact. We often tends to analysis the pros and cons of scheduling a meetings, making it worthwhile and things that can make that meeting more effective.

Ideally, the individual or individuals responsible for scheduling, facilitating or monitoring the meeting would determine what is needed to make the meeting meaningful and worthwhile. There are couple of things which you as an individual or individuals need to ask yourself before you go ahead and schedule a meeting or get scheduled for a meeting:

1. What is the purpose of the meeting?
2. Are you prepared for the meeting?
3. Do you have enough information or content which can make your meeting meaningful? If your answer is yes, then give a thought that the points you have are appropriate for the current meeting?
4. If those points are appropriate, then think for few seconds stating are you really prepared to put across or convey your thoughts in front of your team, team leader, manager or leadership?
5. What should be the take away from the meeting and how it gonna effect the current situation?

If you have answers for the above questions, you can easily make that meeting successful. The reason it’s important because everyone who attends a meeting would want that meeting to be as meaningful as possible.

If you don’t then look for those answers and work hard to make your meeting effective because a bad meeting can create a negative impact on your profile and may slow-down your growth within the organization.

Below are the best practices before you go ahead and schedule a meeting:

1. Prepare Agenda – A well planned Agenda can creates lot of possibilities of making your meeting meaningful.
2. Attendees – If you want your meeting to be successful and effective, make sure to select or invite the right people for the meeting who can contribute in sharing knowledge, technical expertise, facts, proper feedback and few other factors. You can either email them or send a calendar invite.
3. Two-Way conversation or discussion– It should not be like a public conference, where only one person speaks and then the rest listens. It should be two-way conversation where everyone present in the meeting should have right to speak and convey their thought or ideas or feedback. Attendees who are effective listeners can make most from the meeting.
4. An Effective Leader or Facilitator – If you would want your meeting to run smoothly and be a successful meeting, be a good leader or facilitator or appoint one from within your team. This will ensure that all the attendees participates, stick to the topic for which meeting has been scheduled and respect one another (Attendees).
5. Action Items – Once the meeting comes to an end there should be some take away and action items on which all the attendees or the concerned persons needs to work on to create an impact or bring a change and make the meeting worthwhile. As suggested and accepted by lot of people dividing the task between people can help everyone in finishing the task with ease and as early as possible.
6. Minutes of the Meeting – It is always a best practice to take down the important points during the meeting. The reason being we as  a human being often tends to forget things more easily as soon as we leaves the meeting room and involved into a different activity or work.
7. Monitoring or Following on the Action Item – Following-up on the action item and monitoring it gives us a picture on whether we are going on the right path and implementing the things as per the process or discussions happened during the meeting to make it successful.

Don’t worry, if you have not been using the above best practices to make your meeting effective and successful. Start using and implementing it today to make your meetings that matters and worthwhile.

I hope this post might have helped you guys and educated you on how to make your “Meeting that Matters” or an “Effective Meeting.” If you like the post, please like and share it. J