Business meetings are an inseparable part of the functioning of any organization. These meetings not only help in keeping a tab on the company’s activities and processes but also provide insights into how you can obtain your goals and objectives. Through these business meetings, business owners and their key people across departments can stay updated about everything, make collective decisions, and also come up with newer and better ideas to fuel the growth of the organization. Regardless of the size and scale of your business, business meetings would always be of immense significance, both for the evaluation as well as the progression of your business.
Before this blog takes you deeper into disclosing the secrets of productive meetings, let’s take a look at some startling facts about business meetings:
- Employees across organizations belonging to different industries spend more than 37% of their precious time conducting business meetings
- The employees in managerial positions attend around 60 meetings in a month
- More than 39% of employees attending the business meetings admitted to dozing off
- Around 25-50% of the business meetings go in 100% vain – which means a complete waste.
In the wake of the same, this blog attempts to reveal some top secrets of successful and productive business meetings in the pointers narrated below:
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Always be clear in your purpose of the business meeting
The first and foremost thing when you start a business meeting is that you must be crystal clear in your purpose for the meeting. Being clear in your purpose simply means why you want to conduct the meeting. The clarity in this regard will provide you with a clear perspective as well as a way for better further proceedings. Purpose concerning a business meeting often denotes the following:
- Sharing any pieces of information with the team members that are crucial for the organization
- Discussing some newer products or services
- Discussing any business problems and brainstorming over the best possible solutions
- Making any futuristic strategy for the growth and development of the organization.
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Set an agenda or a detailed meeting plan
It might come to you as a big surprise that setting a clear agenda or detailed business plan helps you decrease your business meeting time by around 75%. Once you have got full clarity over the purpose of the meeting, you can conveniently create a specific strategy to achieve it. Therefore, prepare a listing of the topics you need to discuss in the meeting and frame up a specific time slot or duration for each topic. You also need to send the schedule to all the individuals concerned so that they can get prepared for the same in an effective manner. Doing this will not only help employees prepare better but also save your precious time.
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Always be particular about the schedule of your meeting
In almost all types of business environments, it is often observed that employees are never so enthused and passionate about business meetings. Obviously, it’s not where you can crack jokes and perform some other funny things. Therefore, start and finish your meeting according to a predetermined timeframe. In the absence of that, all your attendees will experience nothing but boredom during the meeting. You might also need to put in some extra effort when it comes to starting and ending your business meeting on time.
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Allow sufficient time for necessary and relevant questioning
“Questions wake people up. They prompt new ideas. They show people new places, new ways of doing things.” – Michael Marquardt.
While conducting a business meeting, you need to be quite flexible and easily approachable to all those who want to raise their questions. This will allow every attendee to actively participate in the meeting and give them a chance to offer their open feedback. Employees who fear giving their feedback always remain dormant when it comes to contributing to the progress and development of the organization. Meaningful and relevant questioning always opens doors to enhanced creativity resulting in a more precise and better understanding of the topics under the meeting agenda. It also arouses interest while encouraging healthy discussion.
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Always keep meetings on track
At various times, keeping a business meeting on track becomes a tough challenge as there can be multiple views and standpoints for the same topic. During the meeting at any point in time if you feel that your meeting is losing track and different other topics are cropping up, then just do the needful. You need to park other ideas for any other dedicated meeting for the same. Only sticking to the primary and predetermined agenda of the meeting can serve the purpose well.
Concluding Note
Conducting a business meeting is both an art and a science, and evaluating its performance is necessary to come to any solid conclusion. After the meeting is over, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Did the meeting accomplish its goal and objective?
- What was the most meaningful moment of the meeting?
- What were the aspects that could be improved?
- What were the elements that caught the attendees’ attention most?
If you get satisfactory answers to all these questions, you can claim you have had a meaningful business meeting. The above tips will definitely help you next time you set out for a business meeting..