Keeping meetings organized and effective
By Christine Vivoli
We have all been in meetings that seem to drag on or discuss unrelated topics. There are steps that can be followed in order to keep your meeting organized and running efficiently. Snackbox offers our top 10 tips for achieving the goal of your meeting in a timely and organized fashion.
- Purpose – Clearly define your purpose or objective for having the meeting.
- Participant – Who must attend this meeting to accomplish the purpose defined?
- Structure – How will you organize the meeting in order to achieve the purpose you set out for? Make sure the technique that you have selected to achieve your purpose has the greatest impact.
- Location and time – Make sure to choose a location and a time that is convenient for your participants. The location should be large enough to accommodate all of the participants.
- Agenda – Make sure all of the participants have a copy of the meeting agenda three days prior to the meeting.
- Responsibilities – A written summary of the participant’s individual assignments prior to the meeting.
- Confirmation – Contact each participant individually a week to three days before the meeting. Once a meeting time and location have been established, try to be consistent with scheduling future meetings.
- Begin your meeting on time and end on time – Scheduling is imperative in being organized and efficient with the rest of your day.
- Ideas Bin – Create a fun way to encourage participants to write down their ideas that are off topic so that they can be discussed at an appropriate time. This is a beneficial way to allow participants not to forget ideas that could be very important.
- Bring food – Food will always energize and motivate participants. After all, PR does run on food.