The importance of running good meetings can seem like common sense to most of us, and yet we've all been in tedious or seemingly never-ending meetings more often than we care to remember.
Most facilitators understand that keeping participants engaged is the primary goal of effective meeting management. Still, without a proper action plan, a productive meeting can easily get derailed. As the facilitator, it's your job to make sure that your sessions stay relevant, timely, engaging, and productive.
This article can help you run successful meetings with just a bit of prep work before, during, and after. To make sure you have all the best practices at your fingertips, we’ll talk about:
Meeting management is any collection of processes that help to coordinate business meetings. When done well, meeting management can help the team members to achieve the meeting goal within the set timeframe.
Effective meeting management is relevant any time a group of people gets together, whether for brainstorming, a stand-up, a project follow-up, or a lunch-and-learn.
However, an excellent meeting will take place on time, cover all the relevant agenda items, and help streamline decision-making, so that team members leave feeling supported and ready to take on the rest of their workday.
These best practices can help you make the most of every meeting.
Before arranging the meeting room or even blocking off time in your Google calendar, clarify the purpose of the meeting with your organizers. A meeting without a clear and communicated purpose is the quickest route to a waste of time, and nobody wants that.
Some examples of meeting purposes:
Next, you’ll need to build your meeting agenda. To do this, ask yourself:
Highlight the purpose of the meeting in the meeting invite title. Include concise and clear sub-points into the meeting agenda so everyone knows what to expect from their time together.
If you're stumped or feel you're missing something during the planning, you can ask for feedback directly from the team using Polly's Meeting Prep template. The template is easy to follow so you can quickly gather input about what meeting items are important to your team.
The two main questions are:
These questions provide an easy way to build inclusivity into your meeting preparation since not everyone feels comfortable speaking out mid-meeting. It can also help you gain greater engagement since you'll know what's important to your participants before the meeting time and can tailor the agenda accordingly.
Even if everything else falls to the wayside, you can safely rely on these four actions to help you have a successful meeting:
As the captain of the ship or meeting facilitator, you have to let the team know where they're headed. Do this by outlining the topics on the agenda and who is responsible for presenting them. Highlight the goals of the meeting and what outcomes you plan to arrive at collectively before the meeting is over. This information ensures everyone understands and can follow along.
Participation can be anything from asking participants to jot down their questions in a specific chat or channel to a request for meeting members to answer a quick polly to get feedback at the end of the meeting. This feedback can help you determine what was successful in the meeting and how to best improve the format for next time. There's always room for improvement, and your team’s feedback is the best way for you to learn.
Have another member of the team handle meeting notes so that, as the facilitator, you can keep your full attention on the timing and ensure that all voices get ample time to be heard.
After each section of the meeting, make sure to agree verbally on who is responsible for the action items and the deadlines. Whoever is note-taking can also make a record by putting each team member's initials next to their action items in the meeting minutes. Having a clear alignment gives a sense of accountability and makes it easy to follow up later since everyone understands their responsibility.
While wrapping up the meeting, the three best things you can do are:
Schedule meetings that your team will value by asking for feedback about what they care about and delivering meetings around those topics or concerns where possible.
Eventually, meeting management can become second nature but in the meantime, use Polly to reach peak collaboration before the meeting even starts by voting on the most pressing team priorities.