In our last post, we talked about how to go about choosing a meeting room that is suitable for your event needs. This post is more like a follow up of that post and we are focusing on the steps you can take to conduct a productive meeting. Here are 5 amazing tips to help you:
Put Your Phone Away
Nothing affects the productivity of a meeting like electronic grazing. It is not uncommon to find out that the attention of attendees is torn between emails, social media, and the meeting. To Prevent this from happening, politely ask attendees to put their phones away before the meeting. This way, you get the undivided attention of everyone present at the meeting.
Schedule Appropriately and Stick to the Time
In one of our recent articles, we highlighted the importance of scheduling your meeting appropriately and sticking to the time. For one, proper scheduling will help to ensure that you get the spot you need for your meeting. In the same vein, sticking to the time will mean that you leave the meeting room early enough to allow others to utilize the same facility.
But those are not the only benefits of proper scheduling and timing, especially when it comes to conducting a productive meeting. In this case, proper scheduling means keeping the meeting as short and structured as possible. Generally, meetings that last for about 30 to 45 minutes have been found to be more productive as attention begins to wane as the meeting gets longer.
And to ensure that everyone leaves the meeting room early enough, choose unusual durations for your meetings and time them to the seconds. For instance, instead of telling the attendees that the meeting will last for 50 minutes, you can tell them that it will last for 42 minutes, the additional 8 minutes will give them enough time to leave the room before the next person arrives.
Besides being a good meeting room etiquette, you will find out that you can get the same amount of value from a meeting in 42 minutes as you would in 50 minutes.
Have a Clear Objective/Agenda
When meeting with a client or your team, there can be a thousand and one things to talk about. Dabbling into many different points without conclusion will not yield a good result. Instead, you should have a clear objective beforehand and stick to it. This will help you achieve one thing by the end of the meeting.
As a rule, it is important to prepare the agenda before a day before the meeting and distribute it to the expected attendees. This way, they will have enough time to organize their thoughts and contributions. This will also go to ensure that everyone is on the same level before the meeting.
Having a clear agenda before the meeting will also save you the time you could have used in introducing the objective of the meeting. This means that upon arrival, everybody is ready to tackle the main issue of the day. Hence, saving you time and ensuring a more productive meeting.
Encourage Attendees to Ask Questions Throughout the Meeting
If you are in charge of a meeting there are basically two things you can do to ensure that everybody is carried along during the meeting. Firstly, inform all the attendees that their feedback, questions, and comments are required. Secondly, encourage them to ask questions as the meeting progress.
This two factors will encourage participation and save you and all the attendees a ton of time towards the end of the meeting.
We sometimes attend a meeting in which an attendee saves too many questions only to throw them at the convener one after the other when everyone was getting ready to wrap things up. So encouraging people to ask their questions during the course of the meeting will prevent the meeting from running over.
Limit/Ban Food and Drinks
While it is acceptable to bring water or tea/coffee to a meeting, you should ban attendees from bringing anything other these into the meeting room. First of all, food can be a source of distraction, not only to the person eating but to other attendees.
Secondly, snacks and other heavy or oily foods can leave a bunch of mess on the tables after the meeting. Remember it is a shared facility and other people may be waiting to enter the room as soon as you finish with your meeting. If any attendee must eat, he or she should do so in the pantry before and after the meeting.
Whether you are a small business owner looking for a small meeting room or a convener looking for a conference room with a stage, myOffice has a space to fit your needs. Get in touch with us today or book a tour in any of our facilities.
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