With effective team meetings, you get a chance to bring all the team members together allowing them to share their ideas, experience, and perspectives with everyone else. However, there are times when these team meetings are completely ineffective despite the urgency of the goals -especially when the team meeting needs to be online. All this chaos needs to be stopped, which is why we are here with 7 essentials when it comes to hosting an effective team meeting.
Plan And Plan
The first and the most important aspect of hosting any team meeting is to plan the meeting and ponder over the different things that you are interested in discussing with your team. By defining the purpose of the meeting, you can easily plan and prepare for the team meeting in a more effective and productive way.
In addition to all this, while making the agenda for the meeting you can create a checklist of the things that you want to discuss in the meeting along with the time that you want to dedicate to a certain point during the meeting.
Communicate And Collaborate
Once you are ready with the plans and the basics for your team meeting, you can start sharing the details of the meeting with all the relevant team members. Issuing the obvious such as the time, date, prerequisites, and location of the meeting along with the proposed agenda is going to help the team members prepare for the meeting in a more effective way.
Here using tools like an online whiteboard can help you effectively convey your message and intention for the meeting with your team members even when you have a distributed team. Besides that, you can also use such tools during your virtual meetings where every team member gets to share their ideas and opinions with you in a seamless way.
Avoid Early Morning Meetings
Unless you want everyone on your team to hate you, try not to organize meetings on Monday morning and Friday evenings. No one, absolutely no one, likes to sit in a meeting at such a time. Especially when the meeting needs to be a video call. Instead, having a meeting at around 10 a.m. where everyone gets to enjoy their morning cup of coffee and the time to go through their notes and meeting agenda is an ideal setting for an effective team meeting.
Moreover, no one will get late to the meeting and the content of the meeting will be there in the mind of all the team members throughout the week. Considering all this, hosting your meeting early in the week is a practical and effective approach.
Keep The Meetings Short And Crisp
Ideally, any meeting that you host or attend should not be more than 30 minutes long. As you plan your meeting, keep in mind the timeframe for the meeting as you don’t want to take up too much time for your team members.
Here creating a checklist and assigning time to all the parts of the meeting is the way to go. The meetings that you attend should be a session of active brainstorming where everyone gets to share ideas instead of wasting time with idle chit chat.
Choosing The Tone And Space
The tone with which you start your meeting is going to get carried throughout the meeting making it important for you to start your meeting in a positive and cheerful manner. During the meeting focusing on the solution rather than the problems should be a way of moving forward with your meeting. Eliminating all this is how you can end your meeting on a high note.
Besides all this, the meeting space, where you host your meeting, is also important. Having an appropriate space with all the necessary facilities that you need for your meeting will make the meeting more smooth and is going to reduce the wastage of time with the set up of different gadgets that you might use during the meeting.
Conclusion
If you are in charge of hosting the meeting, then keeping in mind all these above-mentioned points is surely going to help you make your meeting more effective, smooth, and productive where all the team members will get enough time and space for sharing their ideas and insights. Shall the meeting be online, use online tools to make the meeting as productive as possible, without consuming your team energies.
