An effective meeting requires careful development of agenda, selection of strong participants and leader, setting a time, good time management, arrangement of facilities, etc. Not to mention the way a meeting is facilitated. That’s why the majority of meetings are unproductive and unstructured.
An effective meeting is a powerful communication tool to solve problems, stimulate ideas and save time that could be wasted on other communication tools such as email, phone calls and paper work.
A lot of meetings are unnecessary and turn out to be a total waste of time both for yourself and our organisation you work with, due to the lack of the very fundamental consideration for effective meeting: whether to meet or not to meet.
A statement of objectives is vitally important to help you decide whether to meet or not to meet. A few examples are:
- To inform staff about the retreat that is planned to take place in two weeks
- To stimulate ideas about the activities to be done at the retreat
- To give updates on the performance of the organisation
- To notify staff of the possible pay raise
- To determine critical skills required for successful performance of staff
After you have set the objectives, you can now decide whether a meeting is necessary to achieve the end results. Or would it be more efficient to get them by other means?
Meeting may not be required for information sharing. Unless it is something motivational for your staff or of vital importance for the sustainability of your company or organisation, Email, bulletin board posting, memorandum or phone calls should do better a better job in conveying the information.
Under certain circumstances, you may also want to think of how important it is for the people you want to attend the meeting. Some information or decision-making is crucial for you but not for your prospective participants.
Meetings are of course necessary if your objective is to do any of the following:
- giving and receiving feedback,
- getting consensus,
- solving problems, stimulating ideas,
- generating actions,
- responding to concerns of the entire that might affect the entire company or organisation (Concern affecting individual persons should be addressed in one-on-one meeting.)
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