Tips for Holding Engaging and Effective Meetings

Meetings are an integral part of most work days, helping teams stay up to date with the latest news and insights and giving everyone a chance to share ideas and thoughts. They’re used for a lot of different purposes in an office but while they can be incredibly useful, they’re often seen as a waste of time or ineffective.

In fact, recent surveys have found that more than 70% of senior managers believe the majority of meetings to be unproductive. In addition, many employees often feel drained by a constant stream of unavoidable meetings which don’t provide any benefit while taking up their valuable time.

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While the majority of meetings might be unproductive, it doesn’t have to be this way. By following these steps, you can ensure your team holds effective and highly productive meetings which are a benefit to the company and your employees.

Set Up a Room Dedicated for Meetings

The first step to holding successful meetings is to make sure you have a dedicated space to hold them in. Companies with closed off meeting rooms are more likely to see higher satisfaction rates from employees, as it means that any talks are private and free from distractions. If your office doesn’t have any dedicated rooms that can be used, it’s also possible to hire a meeting room.

Simply search for meeting room hire Melbourne to find a list of all available options. Choosing a meeting room close to your office is the best solution, as you won’t want to make everyone travel long distances to attend. Hiring meeting rooms is also a great solution for remote teams, allowing everyone to have in-person meetings at scheduled times.

Have a Clear Agenda

Proper planning is the key to success in any area and meetings are no different. It’s important to set out a clear agenda of points and topics that will be covered in the meeting. Ensure the structure is laid out carefully, with timescales for each topic. Ideally, you want to limit your meetings to a short time, with no more than half an hour. The best meetings are clear, concise and helpful. Overrunning will simply use up people’s valuable time and affect their productivity.

In addition, don’t just list out all the points in one continuous stream of talking. Make sure you break up the meeting into sections and give a chance for others to give their opinions and thoughts. Before each meeting, ensure that everyone has a copy of the agenda so they know in advance what will be discussed. This will give them time to prepare questions or feelings.

Encourage Participation

As covered in the last point, participation from the rest of the team is vital. If it’s one person talking continuously, the meeting is far less engaging and all the attendees are likely to lose interest. You need to actively encourage participation, giving others the chance to share their own ideas and thoughts on what’s being discussed. This should be limited to keep within the scheduled time, but ideally people should be free to ask questions.

A meeting without participation can simply be a few bullet points sent around in an email. The whole point of a meeting is to ensure that everyone gets to share their own ideas, increasing collaboration and helping the team feel connected.

Use Visuals

PowerPoint is one of the most popular tools for giving meetings and presentations. This is because it’s extremely useful to use visuals when giving a meeting. You want to be able to illustrate the points you make and create something that is engaging and interesting. Humour can be used in the right circumstances, and don’t be afraid to get creative when telling a story.