Meetings can serve as an excellent tool in aligning your team’s efforts and achieving your revenue goals. Unfortunately, many professionals spend about two hours a week in meetings that don’t seem to have a clear purpose.
Just coming together regularly is not enough to drive productivity and improve performance companywide. You need to have clear meeting goals in mind that help all your employees get on the same page and help promote your firm’s success.
So, if you are tired of running unproductive meetings, use this guide to understand four goals to focus on in the future:
- Create Alignment Between All Your Stakeholders
- Make Key Decisions with Help from the Group
- Establish Transparency Between All Departments
- Build Working Relationships to Last a Lifetime
Create Alignment Between All Your Stakeholders
Although everyone likely knows their job duties and does them well, they may not have a clear view of the big picture as it pertains to your company’s success. Understanding what your company does and why, all your stakeholders can make the best decisions possible and work toward a common goal.
For that reason, the objectives of meetings should always center around creating alignment between all your stakeholders. Aim to give them the who, what, where, when, and why of your efforts and goals, so they can handle the how with confidence they’re on the right track.
When the purpose of meeting centers around solving problems, give them all the facts in a clear, understandable format. Then, use the meeting agenda to dream up solutions and figure out how to best approach each step.
Make Key Decisions with Help from the Group
Once everyone understands the meeting objectives and agenda, you can move on to discussing all the possible outcomes for each proposed solution. By breaking down the meeting in this manner, it’s possible to see the issue from every direction.
The meeting agenda template should hit on all the topics that surround the decision-making process and be provided to your team well before coming together. With that move, you give everyone a chance to reflect on their roles in the company and see how they can contribute to solving the issue at hand.
Once you all go over the meeting agenda topics, you can decide how to handle the next steps. You may have everyone vote on their preferred solutions or just decide for the team. Either way, clearly explain your reason for going with the selected solution, how each person will contribute, and what you expect along the way.
Establish Transparency Between All Departments
How many times have you attempted to resolve a problem only to find out a different department had the key solution the whole time? Many companies could benefit from true transparency that keeps all their departments well informed and working together.
Thankfully, you can make transparency a way of life at your firm by embracing the power of meeting goals. As you use meetings to share details across all teams, you can facilitate other helpful conversations and find all the best solutions to each issue that arises.
To make transparency a top priority, you will need to create and store informative agendas in a helpful software system, like Docket. You can then have all teams refer back to each meeting agenda to see what they may have missed and gain the knowledge they need to do their jobs right.
Build Working Relationships to Last a Lifetime
Meetings help build strong working relationships across every team, ensuring that your employees work great together for the long run. As you develop a team meeting agenda template, your ability to improve transparency and facilitate conversations will help your employees build trust in each other and the company as a whole.
Your employees can even use the agenda templates to dream up their own helpful meetings to help achieve their career goals. They can put matters like setting goals at work and what are good personal goals for work on the agenda to support each other in their careers. They can then even come up with sample goals for employees that kickstart their successes and keep the company growing and thriving through the years.
How to Start Achieving All Your Meeting Goals
If you want to achieve all your meeting goals, make sure to bring everyone together around a shared purpose. Build a strong agenda for each meeting with time blocks set up for each topic. And give everyone a copy, so they can review what’s up for discussion before sitting around the conference table. As you do this, you’ll likely find that it’s easier than ever to achieve your meeting goals and support your employees in doing their best work.
