Business Meeting Protocols
Conducting Effective Business Meeting
Business all over the world, whether there only a few or many employees, conduct
meetings as to bringing a group or team together to work for a common purpose.
It may be possible that employees are able to carry out transactions with one another in
an organization in many different ways, business meetings — if they are conducted the
right way — can be incredibly effective and efficient.
Business meetings are an essential feature of making a group or team successful.
Meetings allow the team to perform beyond the potential of each individual member.
In meetings, the individual contributions are synergized to maximize the potential of the
team.
By bringing together members in meetings to pursue a common focus, better decisions,
commitment, support, and implementation can result.
The key is making the meeting effective.
Effective meetings require an action-oriented focus.
All members must share the focus, understand each others role, and use a common
process geared toward specific outcomes.
Eight Ways to Make Meetings Better
Here are some time-tested techniques to ensure better business meetings proposed Kathleen
Allen (2017):
1. Be prepared.
Meetings are work, so, just as in any other work activity, the better prepared you are for them,
the better the results you can expect.
2. Have an agenda
An agenda — a list of the topics to be covered during the course of a meeting — can
play a critical role in the success of any meeting.
It shows participants where they are going, but it’s then up to the participants to figure
out how to get there.
Be sure to distribute the agenda and any prework in advance.
By distributing the agenda and prework before the meeting, participants can prepare for
the meeting ahead of time.
As a result, they will be immediately engaged in the business of the meeting, and they’ll
waste far less time throughout the meeting.
3. Start on time and end on time.
Everyone has suffered through meetings that went way beyond the scheduled ending
time.
That situation would be fine if no one had anything else to do at work.
But in these days of faster and more flexible organizations, everyone always has plenty
of work on the to-do list.
If you announce the length of the meeting and then stick to it, fewer participants will
keep looking at their watches, and more participants will take an active role in your
meeting.
4. Have fewer (but better) meetings.
Call a meeting only when it is absolutely necessary.
Before you call a meeting, ask yourself whether you can achieve your goal in some other
way, perhaps through a one-on-one discussion with someone in your organization, a
telephone conference call, or a simple exchange of e-mail.
As you reduce the number of meetings you have, be sure to improve their quality
5. Include, rather than exclude.
Meetings are only as good as the ideas that the participants bring forward.
Great ideas can come from anyone in an organization, not just its managers.
Roy Disney, vice chairman of the Walt Disney Company, tells a great story that illustrates
this point perfectly.
Says Disney, “There’s an old story about Walt from the early days when we were making short
subjects — really just a collection of gags.
Every week, Walt had a gag contest, and everybody was free to enter — the winner got
$5, which was a lot of money during the Depression.
It’s not about who’s the boss. It’s about who’s got the best ideas.”
6. Maintain the focus.
Meetings can easily get off track and stay off track.
Meetings do not achieve their goals.
Meeting leaders and participants must actively work to keep meetings focused on the agenda
items.
Topics should not include the results of the latest football game, or who had lunch with whom,
or who’s driving that shiny new Porsche.
Whenever you see the meeting drifting off track, speak up and push the other attendees to get
it back in focus.
7. Capture and assign action items.
Unless they are held purely to communicate information, or for other special purposes, most
meetings result in action items, tasks, and other assignments for one or more participants.
Don’t assume that all participants are going to take their assignments to heart and remember all
the details.
Instead, be sure that someone has agreed to take on the job of record keeping.
Immediately after the meeting, summarize the outcome of the meeting, as well as assignments
and timelines, and e-mail a copy of this summary to all attendees.
8. Get feedback.
Every meeting has room for improvement.
Be sure to solicit feedback from meeting attendees on how the meeting went right for them —
and how it went wrong
You can use a simple form to solicit feedback, or you can simply informally speak with attendees
after the meeting to get their input.
