101: MEETING AGENDAS
Behind every truly effective meeting is a planned and organized agenda. This crucial item — and the forethought that go into it — can be overlooked in the rush to plan and attend said meeting. Agendas should be more that a general list of things that need to be covered. Like a good map, a strong agenda should prevent the meeting from drifting off course. Here are three ways to set up effective meeting agendas:
Set the tone. If you are looking to get meeting attendees active and engaged, launching your meeting with a PowerPoint demonstration will do the opposite — it will put them into listen mode, or worse. “Find a topic that gets people talking early on,” advised a blog entry at VirtualMgmt.com.
Understand that wasted time is wasted money. You should only be discussing topics that affect your entire team, said Roger Schwartz in an article at HBR.org. Meetings aren't always easy to coordinate, after all. Team-wide issues should be the focus. “These are often ones in which individuals must coordinate their actions because their parts of the organization are interdependent … If the team isn't spending most of the meeting talking about interdependent issues, members will disengage and ultimately not attend,” said Schwartz.
Set it up. Send an email announcing the meeting and asking for agenda item submissions. Once you receive those submissions, put them in a table format and label them “agenda item,” “presenter” and “time.” It's your responsibility to ensure that each agenda item is directly related to the goals of this particular meeting,” said an article at EffectiveMeetings.com. The article encourages being realistic in the amount of time set aside for each speaker. Too many agenda items help no one. Above all, ensure your meeting don't go past their stated end time; in planning, leave 10 minutes of extra time just in case. n
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments