How to Run Effective Meetings

 

You’ve been tasked with leading a meeting. Easier said than done.

From beginning to end, running meetings effectively takes more time and effort than you’d think. With the meeting process, there’s personal preparation, agenda-setting, recording & note-taking and finally, being able to send and track follow up tasks that result from the meeting. In order to have a productive meeting, you need to set aside some time to make sure the meeting is effective for everyone.

How can you effectively run your next meeting? Here are some tips on how to run effective meetings.

 

Tips on How to Run Effective Meetings

When approaching your next meeting, keep these tips in mind:

 

Is the meeting worth having?

It seems like an obvious question, but one worth stopping and asking yourself. The stigma around meetings is that there are way too many meetings. The majority of employees would rather get work done than be subjected to a meeting that could have been an email. If it’s not worth having a meeting, consider other alternatives.

 

Personal preparation

Before calling for a meeting, you’ll want to plan for the meeting beforehand. Consider ask yourself these questions about your upcoming meeting:

  • What you will say and what is your involvement and role in the meeting?
  • What is the purpose of the meeting?
  • How will you deliver your message?
  • What do you need from other meeting attendees prior to the meeting?

Asking yourself these questions will help you gain the information you’ll need to move forward with the meeting.

 

What kind of meeting is this?

One big question that needs to be answered when planning a meeting is the purpose of the meeting. It’s important that the attendees of the meeting know what the purpose is so they can help you reach the end goal. The purpose of each meeting can be directly tied into the type of meeting you plan to call for. Here are some general types of meetings, the expected time limits, and the purpose

  • Stand-ups: 10-15 min – a recurring daily meeting designed for small teams to touch base about tasks individuals are working on.
  • Recurring Team Meetings: 15-30 min – typically a weekly or biweekly meeting that may feature larger teams or departments.
  • Brainstorming Meetings: 1 hour – meetings that are called for a team to come up with a solution to a problem.
  • Decision-Making Meeting: 1-2 hours – used when teams need to come to a conclusion on a significant decision and a plan in place to carry out the decision.

When sending a meeting agenda to attendees of the meeting, it’s best to include the type of meeting within the agenda – that way, it’s clear to everyone, and there is no confusion about its purpose.

 

Establish your meeting objective early

Make it clear to meeting participants what the goal of the meeting is before the meeting takes place. This means sending an agenda with the meeting objective, but in addition to that, telling your team in-person, if possible.

 

Encourage participation

Depending on the type of meeting, encouraging participating helps your team come to the right decision, faster. If a meeting calls for participation, it’s important to make that clear in the agenda. The meeting will be more much effective if meeting attendees know that participation is encouraged, which will prompt them to prepare for the meeting appropriately. It may even benefit you to have them bring questions or topics to discuss to the meeting.

 

Stay on Track

The purpose of any meeting is to achieve a goal. That goal can be different depending on the type of meeting. If the meeting gets hijacked by someone else, it’s your job as a meeting host to get the conversation back on track. Always have the end goal of the meeting in mind throughout the meeting, and be aware of the time remaining during the meeting.

 

Have Clear Next Steps

Once the goal is achieved, and the meeting is over, you’ll have some next steps that come from the meeting. It’s important to have next steps that are clear for everyone to understand. It’s also important for meeting participants to know who is responsible for each task that comes out of the meeting. Documenting next steps and assigning the tasks to an assignee on your team makes everyone’s lives a lot easier, post-meeting – which also helps set-up a follow-up meeting.

 

How Meeting Management Tools to Help Effectively Run a Meeting

 

How can using a meeting management tool like yoyomeeting help you? First off, with the amount of time that goes into preparing and running a meeting, it will reduce the amount of time needed on your end to prepare and run the meeting. It will also help you keep on track – by helping documenting everything discussed and assign follow-up tasks to specific attendees.

 

All-in-one tool for your effective meeting management

With our meeting management add-in for Office 365, running effective meetings is an art anyone can perform. Agenda setting, conducting the meeting, taking tasks and decisions and sending meeting notes: With yoyomeeting, everything is at hand to run any type of meeting effectively.

 

Organize effective meetings … effectively!

Improving meeting effectiveness starts with a decent agenda. With yoyoymeeting, it’s quick and easy to create an agenda for your meeting. Everyone is informed before the meeting starts. During the meeting, our Office 365 add-in helps you take meeting notes, assign tasks and record decisions. The included time boxing option is also a feature to improve your meeting effectiveness. After the meeting, it is just a few clicks to generate the meeting protocol, sending all separate tasks to the responsible attendees to follow up. The result: better meetings with less hassle!

 

The tool to change meeting habits

We have never seen effective meeting strategies when it comes to sustainably improve meeting effectiveness! Printouts of “Golden Meeting Rules” or “Our New Meeting Culture” do not work. They might give you the warm feeling of doing something about the bad meetings habits in your organization, but they do not change them! Why? Because you try to change habits and routines acquired over many years of practice. To change this, the only effective meeting strategy for improving your meeting habits is a tool that guides you through the process and changes the routines: yoyomeeting.

 

Everyone is an effective meeting host

When it comes to running effective meetings, it is a combination of skills and methods – and your standing within your organization. Learning the skills is possible, but having the guts to interrupt even superiors to re-focus on the discussed topic or proceed with what’s really needed to get things done in time, is hard to learn. But there is good news: you can still do the job! Just follow the yoyomeeting structure and let our meeting tool guide you through your agenda. With yoyomeeting, it’s easier to focus on valuable discussions and to get everyone on track for improved meetings with great results!

 

Run Effective Meetings With yoyomeeting.

 

With yoyomeeting, you can effectively run meetings effectively with great time-saving features that keep you organized. Our meeting management software helps with the many pahses of meetings, including meeting planning, meeting recording and meeting recaps. Get your free 2-week trial today.