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Meetings are one of those things that seem to be unavoidable in business today. For some of us, they feel like a bit of a chore, but they are a very important communication tool.
If meetings are not run correctly they will feel like they become a bit of a drain on your time, so here are some top tips for effective meetings.
Inviting people to a meeting sounds like it should be a simple thing to do. Just pop them over a meeting invite, and that should be job done.
But, let's reverse the role for a second. Think about how you feel when you just get a calendar invite sent to you asking you to attend a meeting. No agenda, no objectives and no details whatsoever about what the meeting is about. It doesn't help or engage you and help with the motivation to attend, does it?
We see a lot of this. Now, consider how you feel when you arrive at the meeting. Are you feeling motivated and like you want to be there? Probably not!
It's safe to say if this is how you would feel, then it's highly likely that others will feel the same if this is how you invite them to a meeting.
If you want people to attend a meeting and want to be there and be fully engaged in the process, then there more to do than just sending a simple invite.
The engagement process starts well before the meeting. You need to help others to prioritise your meeting over everything else that you have going on. This means we need to add more detail to the meeting invite.
A meeting invite should have:
When we deliver training courses that include sessions on how to run a successful meeting, we use a tool called a POP Template. This tool helps us to achieve all of the above. POP stands for Purpose, Objectives, Process.
By completing the document adding/pasting it into the meeting invitation, it allows for more successful meetings as it aims to help meeting delegates to become more engaged in the meeting before they even arrive.
It also helps others to effectively prioritise, meaning they should be able to come back to you and let you know that they have something that is more business-critical to work on rather than attend the meeting. This should be completely allowable.
You can read more about POP in the article POP - A Template for Inviting People to a Meeting on skilliki.com.
We hope you find these tips useful. You can find out more about holding effective meetings as well as improving other areas of your communication with our Successful Meetings Training Course. To get more information take a look at the Successful Meetings Training Course overview.