Business Meetings

TODO: What is a Business meeting in one sentence

Preparation

• For an efficient and productive meeting we have to be sure that there are contents and discussions that deserve to be faced in the meeting.
  • no useless meeting are allowed!!
• We should think about what is a meeting and what kind of meeting we would like to have.
  • (informative meeting, informal meeting, brainstorming, updating meeting... etc...).
• Meetings are time-consumption, this mean that time used for meeting is time subtracted to work.
• It is useless and unproductive to organize meetings without anything to talk about.
  • Every meeting has a cost in time terms.
• The choice of the place in which the meeting take place should be carefully took into consideration.
  • The meeting should be organized in an appropriate room in terms of size, technologies and space organization according to the kind of meeting and its goals.

Meeting Process

• Meetings are for companies and enterprises the moment in which all the members of a team, or the participants of a project meet up all together and share their ideas about how to improve what they are doing, they can coordinate their actions and update others about their intake and progresses.
  • Sharing ideas, giving feedbacks and listen to other people's opinion help the participants of a project to improve their work.
  • Listening a feedback from others is always a good confirmation about our job or an alarm bell if we are following the wrong path.
• Meetings should be the opportunity for companies/enterprises to plan and schedule business process.
  • Every activity and task can be discussed during the meetings in a cross-departmental context.
• Goals and achievements can be determined and planned.
• Only after that all the participants of the meeting agree on the points treated during the meeting they can start to work on the task of their competence in a coordinated and more efficient way.
  • It is important that all the departments and functions work synchronized in order to achieve goals in a harmonic way
• For every goal should be scheduled a temporary window in which the goal should be achieved by the responsible person.

Moderation

• Every meeting should be moderated by a speaker (or moderator) that will lead the meeting through the planned points
• The moderator should interpret all the qualified participants for any point
• Moderator is responsible for the conduct of the meeting. He has to ensure all the points are faced and satisfactorily treated.

Follow-up

• It is useful to note down in a report the points and the topics faced during the meeting by the participants, their interventions and outcomes for every point .
• The report should be filed and stored for future consulting.
• It is crucially important to monitor the members activity and the company/enterprise trend according to time-scheduled goals which are shared between all the departments.
  • Meetings are useless if project members will not do what they planned during the meeting.

Infinite types of meeting

Meetings are organized for different purpose and with different shape

Reasons for a meeting

• Companies, enterprises, and any kind of public and private institution use to organize and plan meetings for different reasons and objective.
• We can distinguish 6 main meeting purposes:

Status Update Meeting

• The participants of the meeting inform others and update them about the status of their work.
• All the participants take stock of the situation and go on with their process in a coordinated way

Decision-Making Meeting

• Managers can organize meetings in which important strategic decisions are taken.
• In some of these meeting decision are taken through a decision process, in some other reasons participants will be asked to vote for the option they think is better for the company

Problem-Solving Meeting

• The aim of this kind of meeting is to solve one or more specific problem.
• Participants of this meeting will be asked to bring their capacities and knowledge to solve those problems

Team-Building Meeting

• This kind of meeting is aimed to engage the participants in the project and to create good relationship and knowledge between them.
• If people have good relationship with their counterparts and they know other people mindset and backgrounds they will be more productive and loyal to the project

Ideas-Sharing Meeting

• It is a sort of brainstorming in which participants share of new ideas and discuss them all together
• ...

Innovation Meeting

Also in this case we have a brainstorming dealing with new ideas, but the aim is to innovate the actual business

Types of meeting

Meetings can assume different shape. We can distinguish:

Online Meeting

Very trendy nowadays are meetings which are not held in person but every participant attend the meeting with a webcam and a pc from different place through a conference software

Traditional Meeting

The meeting is held in a room in which participants are invited and they interact. Those meetings can be more or less interactive according to the outcome that the meeting organizators want to reach

Conference

Conferences are big meetings, in which usually there are few people presenting their communications and a wider crowd that listen and get informed. The interaction between message sender and receiver is reduced to a minimum

Informal Meetings

Meetings don't have always to be boring and unpleasant. Meetings can be organized in informal situations inside or outside the office. Work issues and solutions can be discussed even at the bar drinking a pint of beer with the colleagues

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