With the new reality and remote work, do you feel like you spend your days drowning in meetings?
Preparing a meeting in advance can be essential to improve its quality and optimize your time and productivity.
In this article, we show you the essential steps for that preparation!
If you look at your professional agenda, you can see that a large percentage of it is blocked with meetings. Although they are necessary for the good management of the teams and their respective tasks, they can easily seem useless if they are not well prepared.
Preparing a meeting is the first step in correcting this problem and for that you have to answer the following questions: Why? What? Who? How?
Why?
“Why” is the first question you should make when preparing a meeting. Why do you need to gather? Usually, there are 3 main reasons to meet with colleagues: to inform, to generate ideas and discuss topics or to make decisions and sometimes these 3 reasons can exist simultaneously. It is important to realize exactly this purpose for an effective meeting.
What?
After the first step, it is necessary to centralize the goal of the meeting to something more concrete. What do you have to say? Create a list of priorities, by topic, for the various subjects that you have in mind to discuss at the meeting. This will make the speech during the meeting much more organized and fluid, which leads the message to reach the listeners clearly and consequently prevents the meeting from taking too long or becoming tiring.
Who?
The third point to think about when preparing a meeting is: who are your recipients? It is important to keep in mind which colleagues can really contribute to the main goal of the meeting and those who play a fundamental role in what you are looking for during the meeting. It is also important to include some people who are not so into the subject in order to get a more external perspective, however, you need to be very cautious so that it does not appear that their presence is unnecessary or that we do not value their time!
How?
This is the last step in preparing a meeting. How will it be done? Virtually or physically? Is support material needed?
Nowadays, given the reality we live in, most meetings are held in a virtual format, so space is no longer an issue. However – in a note for the future – a space without noise and distractions will have a major positive impact on its durability and results.
You should also consider, according to the purpose of the meeting, to take some visual support material with you, such as a presentation or a document that facilitates the process of explaining to your colleagues what you need!
Following these steps, you will see that the meetings that seemed endless will now have another dynamism and fluidity and thus you will have more time available to be able to carry out your individual work. At the end of the meeting, try to consult your colleagues to find out their feedback on it. Share the record of the gathering with all stakeholders or send an email with a summary of what was said, in order to streamline and follow up the processes that were decided in the meeting and, if necessary, schedule the next one!
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