Intro

We all enjoy meetings right? Well… maybe it’s fairer to say that we all enjoy effective meetings. In this day and age, meetings are held in so many new and different settings. As meeting attendees, we recognize and appreciate the leaders who run meetings efficiently by capturing our attention, mastering technology, getting to the point, and not wasting time. So how do we facilitate meetings that our colleagues look forward to attending? Here are some ideas.

10 Best Practices

1. Ask yourself, “What will participants get out of this meeting?” By answering this, you will establish clear outcomes, create an agenda, invite the right people etc.
2. Make sure if decisions need to be made as a result of the meeting that you know who will need to make them and inform them ahead of time.
3. Optimize meeting flow by determining how many people will participate, time zone differences and take that into consideration when planning.
4. Time-box everything into small chunks of 5-10 minutes.
5. Assign different roles such as discussion leads and scribes.
6. Prepare materials to maximize time together. For example, push activities that can be accomplished asynchronously to before and after the meeting or workshop.
7. Plan for communication challenges such as the same few people doing most of the speaking during the meetings.
8. Make the session interactive by asking for feedback or using polls and breakout rooms.
9. Engage participants by building in Liberating Structures exercises so that everyone is included and engaged. Liberating Structures were developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. Impromptu Networking is a great way to jump start a meeting and form connections.  Stay tuned because we will be writing a future post about the benefits of Liberating Structures.
10. Use digital collaboration tools – Enhance visual learning by collaborating, brainstorming and sharing interactively with tools such as Mural, Miro or digital whiteboards. Share online documents or drives as needed.

Improve virtual collaboration process and outcome

• Describe what’s on the screen and give directions as clear as possible.
• Create a fall-back plan for technology failures.
• Model being receptive to feedback.

Conclusion

Believe it- your work to foster and improve team collaboration in virtual, hybrid or in-person environments will pay off. Your continued success as managers and implementers will be heavily influenced by our dedication to these details. Good luck!