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Meetings and meeting management
Face-to-face or virtual meetings are used for decision making, and they’re used for responding to stakeholder requests, having discussions with suppliers, vendors and other project stakeholders. Meeting management is taking those steps to ensure that meetings meet their intended objectives quickly and efficiently, so that we’re not all stuck in meetings that we don’t want to be in.
Steps for Effective Meeting Management
What are the steps for effective meeting management? First of all, it’s ideal to prepare and distribute that agenda, stating the objectives of the meeting. What are we trying to achieve? Send this out to everyone involved, so everyone’s on the same page.
We should ensure that the meetings start and finish at the published time. Sometimes meetings drag on and it’s not ideal for other people – we’ve all got other things to do.
We should ensure the appropriate participants are invited and attend. If they can’t attend, can we change the meeting time or can we ask them to reach reshuffle other things? Sometimes we have to shuffle these things around.
We should stay on topic, and as we go along on that intended topic we should manage the expectations, issues and conflicts during the meeting. Sometimes it’s best not to promise the world, and instead we’re managing those expectations. It is quite an important thing, maybe it can be done but by ensuring we don’t promise that upfront we’re under promising and over delivering in that way.
Lastly, record all actions and those who have been allocated the responsibility for completing any actions. This usually comes from the meeting minutes at the end, or it can be in the form of just a follow-up email or an actual professional proper document. But what was discussed, what actions came out of it, and what do we need to do to follow up for next time?
And that is meeting management.
– David McLachlan