Meetings are a staple of many people’s lives. You’d be hard pushed to find a person over the age of 18 who has not attended a meeting of some description – they can come in many forms.
Before looking into what the key components are to running a good meeting, it’s key the first understand what a meeting is, and the different types of meeting that we come across in our day-to-day lives.
What Is A Meeting?
The dictionary definition of a meeting is as follows; an assembly of people for a particular purpose, especially for formal discussion.
And in short, that is correct. However, there are many types of meeting scenarios that you could come across in both your work and personal life.
Stereotypically, we think of a meeting as a group of people dressed in formal attire sat around a table, all shuffling pieces of paper while a large PowerPoint presentation looms large in the background. But, this doesn’t have to be the case. A meeting can be something as simple as an informal family discussion about what’s for dinner that evening, or a number of amateur sportsmen or women conversing about the tactics to deploy during the weekends big game!
The 3 Components To A Successful Meeting:
Pick A Suitable Venue
Recent technological developments mean that we can now conduct meetings from pretty much anywhere in the world. However, despite the widespread capability to conference into a meeting, ensuring that meeting participants are in a suitable location is still key.
One way to be sure that you have a secure meeting location without distractions is to hire a meeting room. Whether or not meeting participants are physically attending or joining from a remote location, hiring a meeting room is a cost-effective and readily available solution when leading a meeting.
Set A Clear Agenda
One issue that many people have with meetings is that they’re often not efficient. Topics arise throughout the meeting, participants attention gets taken off-track and the meeting can often conclude without the initial purpose of the meeting being converted.
Setting a clear meeting agenda firstly signals that you mean business (even if it is just discussing what’s for dinner), and helps to keep the discussions on topic.
Invite The Necessary Attendees
Finally, you have the venue, you have the agenda; but what about the input? It’s imperative when organising a meeting that you understand who needs to be in the meeting. Who needs to provide input in order to reach the necessary solution.
Knowing who needs to be in a meeting can often be driven by the agenda, as this is a natural opportunity for you to outline the topics to be converted, and whose area of speciality that topic is. If a certain individuals specific knowledge area is to be covered in a meeting, then it makes sense for them to be a part of it!
Although there are many facets to running a good meeting, following the above steps will give you a solid base to build from. From there, it’s about making sure that the agenda is followed, and that the meeting input allows you to reach the required solution.
