It’s important to cooperate and deepen your knowledge about business meetings. After all, you are a part of a whole in the company you work at, whether you are part of the staff or the CEO.
To know the goals of your company, its mission and vision, and understand the purpose of each meeting will make you adapt well, once every company values productivity and solution-oriented people. For that, meetings need to be as effective as possible, otherwise these become moments of pure waste of time and a demotivation source for the staff. Besides, each type of meeting requests a specific layout and planning. It involves organizing the space, materials, establishing priorities, guidelines and above it all a cleat goal of what to obtain with such meeting.
All that needs to be taken into consideration so that the team feels that it was worth their time!
Let’s see some different types of business meetings?
1. Information sharing meeting:
Some decisions are taken together but the strategic ones are made by superiores (the Board of directores) and passed on to the rest of the staff in these meetings. Here it’s when the team receives instructions about changes or decisions that have been decided.
2. Decision making meeting:
The decisions mentioned previously, normally made by key professionals, with the autonomy to define the strategic planning of the organization, are made in Decision-Making meetings.
3. 1-on-1 / Feedback meeting:
In this case there is the manager band one employee, and these meetings should happen somewhat often, because they are a great opportunity for the leader to make a complete evaluation of the professionals it leads, bringing suggestions of improvement of weaknesses, giving constructive feedback and also acknowledging the strengths of each member of their team.
4. Training meeting:
Training meetings should happen occasionally, whenever there is an implementation of some kind, a new program, skill or tool. It usually involves an outside professional, or specialist, to answer any questions, train the team in the new technology.
5. Innovation meetings
Probably one of the most productive and fun to attend of all meetings, it’s in the creative meetings that challenges are discussed and imagination is turned on. Brainstorming techniques are used to give birth to innovative and solution-oriented ideas. Focus is, however, of utmost importance so these meetings meet the desired outcome.
6. Planning meeting:
Managers and directors gather to plan the upcoming year, presenting results and defining strategies for new goals and how to achieve them as well as generate new business opportunities. Participants should be engaged and have access to material/ tools, which allow them to share slides, videos, graphs, etc.
7. Kick-off meeting:
Every time there is a new client or contract and a new project is at hands, all the participants gather to establish goals, resources, restrictions, deadline and chronograms related to the project in question, so that to cover from its development to the implantation and training stages. This meeting normally happens in a place outside of work to facilitate communication and avoid interruptions.
8. Follow-up meeting:
During a Project development, these meetings occur quite often maybe weekly, as to follow on the execution of the plans previously agreed on. It should have an agenda focused on performance indicators and goals to make it possible to check the project development and deadline. The biggest focus is to verify what’s happening within expected or not and the leader (usually the project manager) can help with solutions and new actions for the future.
9. Team meeting:
Leader and leaded of each department have the opportunity to share ideas, suggestions, viewpoints and trim possible edges in the company’s development. These are good moments for motivational speeches, to engage the team in the mission, vision and values of the company, to talk about changes or advancements or even work together on the performance indicators.
So not to lose focus and end up wasting the precious time of employees it is also important to know what must be avoided in every business meeting:
- To have a meeting without an agenda. You might think you have it all memorized but without a guideline or, at least, the specific topics that should be covered, with people interrupting the risk is high for something important to be forgotten or even not mentioning a problem that needs solution, leading to the “meeting to schedule a meeting”.
- No time to finish. A good meeting should have a time to start and finish so not to waste time with digressions about matters that are not a priority at the moment.
- Too many people. All the attendees should be directly involved in the subjects to be discussed. When there are too many people, besides wasting everybody’s time, digressions will happen from people unaware of the matter at focus or even those who have different priorities.
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