Hosting an unproductive meeting, or worse, attending a boring meeting is frustrating. If you are leading a meeting then it is your responsibility to make it interesting and engaging, and not leave it on an unproductive note.
After the coronavirus virus, the new remote working standards happened to increase corporate meetings to an all-time high. While many employees working from home reported experiencing Zoom fatigues due to long durations of virtual meetings, others had a hard time attending the meeting with a slow internet connection. Although finding good internet deals should not be a difficult task, many internet providers like Spectrum billing are offering high-speed internet plans best suited for remote workers. But even with a good internet speed, an unproductive meeting is still a curse for employees.
Again, if you are leading a team meeting you can save your remote workers and other employees from dreading unproductive meetings. Following are some of the tips that will help you construct a productive team meeting that participants can look forward to.
Send Out a Concise Email to Participants
The first thing you must do before inviting people into your meeting is to send an email to all the participants. Keeping meetings productive has to start with keeping things professional. The email should be clear about what meeting goals are, are the agendas, and the estimated duration of the meeting.
While your email should have all the information participants need, it should also be concise. Too much information can often lead your participant into ignoring the essential parts. Make sure that you do not write long or multiple paragraphs. You can make bullet points as it helps to decrease the redundancy and make the email more engaging.
Ask Participants to Engage in Preparatory Work
When creating your email, make sure you have space to include a request for the participants to reflect on and share their responses before the meeting. This way you can make sure the participants have understood the point of the meeting and get them thinking before starting the meeting.
You can ask participants to directly contact you rather than replying in the group where everyone else is also engaging. People might feel more comfortable in direct replies rather than sharing their thoughts with everyone.
Share Content with the Group Beforehand
Once you have received pre-work from your participants, you can share the content with all the meeting participants after synthesizing it. You can ensure that the content is edited to avoid redundancy. Make sure you do not name the respondents because at this stage you should aim for diversity in ideas rather than focus on who said what.
Bring Discussion Back to Meeting’s Purpose
Even after having the most pre-planned meeting, you might find your participants leading to an off-tracked discussion. Here you should make sure that the ideas generated are productive for the meeting and only related to the meeting purpose.
In this meeting, you can bring your participants back to the meeting topic and do not let the meeting objective slide away.
Bottom Line
Structuring a meeting timeline, keeping participants focused on the meeting purpose, creating a concise pre-meeting email, and encouraging participant feedback are some of the ways to host a productive meeting online.
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