How to Conduct a Highly Effective Meeting

Meeting or conference rooms are important in every organization, since most of the important and major decisions are made here. As such, it is extremely important to focus on your conference room and design it in a way that people are encouraged to think about creative and innovative solutions. From setting up the right conference room furniture to choosing the right colour scheme, everything needs to be perfect.

However, these are factors to be considered while setting up the meeting room. How do you ensure that after the meeting room is set up, your meetings are productive and effective? Detailed below are some of the best habits to get into in order to conduct highly effective meetings.

Prepare your agenda in advance

Having vague discussions in a meeting can actually cost you a lot of time and money. A study states that an almost 63% of meetings have no planned agenda (Matyszczyk C, 2015). In order to avoid meetings being a waste of time, it’s important to prepare your agenda in advance.

Prepare a proper attendee list

Across a 40 year career, an average person spends 17,470 hours attending meetings (Schutte S, 2016). This just shows how much of our useful resources we actually waste in non-essential meetings. It’s important to make sure you invite only the concerned and necessary people for the meeting rather than calling in the entire team. Having a proper attendee list will help you rationalise the important people who need to attend the meeting.

Time your meetings

Having unnecessarily long meetings affects the productivity of your company. It’s important to make sure your meetings are short and to the point. Allotting a set time to every point of discussion will help you wrap up the meeting within the given time period.

Make all the arrangements for the meeting in advance

Another reason for unproductive meetings is unnecessary disruptions or distractions. Simple factors such as ensuring you have the perfect number of conference chairs, all the markers in place for your whiteboard and having the PowerPoint presentation ready are some ways in which you can effectively arrange everything prior to the meeting.

Take proper notes for yourself

Make sure you have written down notes from the meeting for yourself. This will help you to go through the important points discussed, follow up on those points and also prepare better for a second meeting.

Follow up on the meeting

Following up in a timely manner is extremely important in order to ensure that the meeting was fruitful and successful. This helps you understand if the necessary measures are being taken after finding a solution for a problem. It also helps in realising if the planned course of action is working effectively or not.

Make use of the "Parking Lot" concept for off topic discussions

Meetings often tend to go off topic because a person wants to raise their point of view within the forum. It could also be an interesting question remotely related to the current topic. In such cases it is advisable to note these points in a separate "parking lot" column so that you can address them later, post meeting or in a future meeting.

The importance of setting up the right conference room cannot be stressed enough. Simple elements such as choosing the right colours, etc. can help you a lot. You can even purchase conference chairs and tables online to meet your requirements. Along with that, following the above mentioned tips can help you conduct effective and productive meetings in the future.

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