Meeting Best Practices
Meetings can help foster collaboration and create a sense of purpose in the workplace, as well as resolve issues, reduce potential problems related to the flow of information, and promote successful growth strategies. Information sent via emails, memos, and videos can be confusing at times and may take a longer time to comprehend. Meetings, whether in-person or remote, can help clarify the overall goals of a team and help members understand how their work fits into the big picture.
In conducting effective meetings, while the meeting content or agenda is essential, it is the format and quality of meetings that make them meaningful and impactful regardless of their type. That is where meeting best practices can come into play.
The different types of work meetings include customer meetings to improve market understanding and customer relationship. Other types of work meetings include departmental meetings such as HR meetings, marketing meetings and sales meetings, which can help ensure consistent strategies across various teams and provide a forum for collective problem-solving, learning and development.
In general, the first meeting of the day allows team managers to lay out their expectations and gain agreement from the team on the goals that must be achieved. Some companies may hold an end-of-day meeting to confirm what was agreed to earlier in the day and see if the objectives were met.
While meetings are necessary to keep employees engaged, identify issues and concerns for insightful business decisions, as well as facilitate impactful discussions, ineffective meetings are considered one of the top time wasters in the workplace.
Just as there are different types of meetings, there are also various methods of conducting meetings. To solve the problem of ineffective meetings and improving meetings with various individuals, clients and teams, a meeting management software such as Docket can help businesses make the entire meeting process more effective from start to finish.
Docket’s easy-to-use platform can help team managers in planning out meetings, engaging
employees, and conducting follow-ups for increased transparency and productivity. With so many different types of work meetings, Docket’s software solution can adapt to any process or workflow and can bring time-saving benefits without the hassle of adding another tool.
Team Meeting Best Practices
Even the most experienced team managers can benefit from acquiring leadership skills for effective team meetings. They can also gain insights from team meeting best practices on how to run motivational team meetings.
Motivational team meetings ideas include outlining specific objectives and identifying concrete steps to achieve them. Team members should be informed ahead of time about what to expect during a meeting so they can get familiarized with the meeting purpose and avoid wasting time. Moreover, managers should keep the focus of team meetings on the entire group and refrain from going off tangent by discussing unrelated topics with individual members.
Creating an action plan – which involves defining the existing situation, identifying obstacles that need to be addressed, and coming up with a detailed plan of action to achieve goals – can make meetings more productive. Finally, managers should make a conscious effort to
keep things relevant and avoid unnecessary meetings that may devalue people’s time and lower their morale.
A meeting agenda software such as Docket can help managers in developing inclusive and participatory team meetings. Docket can also enable users to create a weekly operations meeting agenda template, which may include minutes of previous meetings and a breakdown of agenda items for discussion. Docket can also be utilized to come up with useful meeting topics. Meeting participants can have access to the template and add their own points to the agenda, take notes, and send meeting summaries.
Virtual Meeting Best Practices
A virtual meeting is considered an effective form of communication because participants can access it from anywhere without having to be present in the same physical space. Due to remote working conditions, some businesses have adopted virtual meetings as their main mode of communication with various teams.
When preparing for virtual meetings, having a virtual meeting best practices checklist outlining the steps for preparing, holding and following up on team meetings can ensure
that all important issues are properly dealt with. Managers will benefit from looking at virtual meeting best practices and virtual facilitation best practices to make virtual meetings more engaging.
During virtual meetings, using appropriate body language when communicating ideas may help alleviate the feeling of not being in the same physical location as other meeting participants. When having virtual meetings, some experts recommend positioning the camera at eye level and sitting at least three feet away from a laptop or device in use. During meeting breaks, asking participants to do a few stretching exercises can help energize them, particularly during long virtual huddles.
Meetings can be time-consuming and counterproductive if they are not properly managed. Sometimes, using technology with a steep learning curve to bring in remote team members or clients to a virtual meeting may complicate things further. A productive meeting should foster a collaborative environment in which all attendees can participate and discuss ideas before returning to their desks, all amped up and prepared for work. Rather than stalling meetings while facilitators get everything up and running, using technology in meetings should enable users to accomplish meeting tasks faster.
Docket is a meeting intelligence platform that enables users to come to meetings with resources and an agenda at hand. By using Docket, team members can easily collaborate during video meeting conferences and stay in sync even after the meeting has ended.
Docket can integrate meeting processes and tools, enabling teams to accomplish more.
Hybrid Meeting Best Practices
Hybrid meetings offer the benefits of both face-to-face and remote participation. Physical attendees benefit from the advantages of in-person communication to relay ideas more clearly, whereas remote attendees enjoy the flexibility of video conferencing, which can bridge the gap between in-house and remote employees while still being able to interact on a personal level. That is why it is important to understand what hybrid meeting best practices entail.
Despite its many advantages, hybrid meetings can also prove to be challenging. For instance, while in-person attendees can use facial expressions and body language while sitting around the conference table together, those attending remotely cannot do so. Furthermore, accomplishing agreed-upon goals and promoting accountability may be difficult.
By leveling the playing field, the challenges of hybrid workplaces can be easily solved.
For a successful hybrid meeting, businesses may refer to best practices for virtual team meetings and review their hybrid meeting checklist. For example, positioning multiple cameras from key vantage points in a conference room allows remote attendees to see each person in the meeting venue in their own video frames as well. This may encourage
remote participants to engage more during hybrid meetings. Communicating the meeting agenda in advance can allow all participants to review talking points and understand the purpose of the meeting. Lastly, using shared digital notepads can help team members track their tasks to completion and share meeting notes in the same system.
Post Meeting Best Practices
When planning and leading effective meetings, it is important to ensure that attendees follow meeting procedures and protocols, as well as post meeting best practices. Meeting procedures and protocols can serve as guidelines to help meetings run smoothly. Meeting protocols are fundamental guidelines that allow participants to understand what is expected of them during a meeting. Meeting procedures, on the other hand, ensure that each group has an equal chance to express their thoughts, perceptions, and personal concerns in line with the meeting agenda.
When ending virtual meetings, it might be a good idea to spend some time discussing the next steps, commitments, and set timeframes. It is also helpful to take notes during a meeting and be able to share notes with those who may need them.
Effective Meetings Guidelines
Effective meetings training, along with effective meetings guidelines, can help managers transform routine meetings into productive and engaging activities. Moreover, creating an effective meeting checklist can enable managers to design the meeting agenda and conduct the meeting.
To hold more effective meetings, it is helpful to create an outline of the purpose of the meeting with specific goals and objectives. Presenting a brief meeting introduction to clarify things can enable participants to get right up to speed. Moreover, managers must be punctual and specific by informing participants of the meeting duration ahead of time. During meetings, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the meeting agenda, which may include identifying problems, presenting decisions and conclusions, and coming up with possible resolutions.
Businesses may benefit from using collaborative meeting software such as Docket to clearly define meeting agendas, keep a record of important decisions, offer effective meetings training exercises, and facilitate end-to-end integration. Docket allows users to create meeting agendas in advance to ensure that all key points are included. The meeting agenda can then be shared with other attendees, who may want to add discussion topics during meetings. Docket users can also keep track of agendas and meeting minutes in a single platform for easy retrieval.
Effective Meeting Skills
When it comes to rules for conducting a meeting and best practices for business meetings, having effective meeting skills and following the rules for conducting a meeting are some important meeting tips to remember.
Meeting processes can be streamlined by using a collaborative tool such as Docket, which can provide pre-built or customized meeting agenda templates. Meeting agendas are particularly helpful for recurring meetings as it enables participants to review the records of previous meetings. Moreover, using a shared calendar app with a tool such as Docket allows managers to share notes with those who were not present during meetings.
