Are you holding an important meeting?
Whenever talking about meetings or teleconferences, whether it is with a friend or a family member, you often hear these words: “We had a pointless meeting again today with..”. Hearing this so often got me thinking: Is there a difference between a pointless meeting and an important meeting? Or is it all subjective; someone might consider a meeting more important than others? Could be. But, there are characteristics that only describe an important meeting. If all your meetings tick at least one of the boxes below: great! If not, it might be time to look into the reasons you keep holding pointless meetings and start working towards to being every employee’s dream company to work for. With ZERO pointless meetings and purely important ones! (Like we have it here at Drum)
Meeting about a change in the organization
Change management is never easy. As you all know, one of the hardest parts of change management is to make employees understand the reason for a change. The other challenge is to handle resistance. Resistance is usually inevitable, whether from one person or from many. Neither of these aspects should be dealt with an email or phone call. At least not as the first channel. Surely after this type of important meeting you might receive tons of emails from upset workers. But when it comes to bringing up the situation, reasoning the change and handling resistance with constructive guidance and understanding, the best way of doing it is to include everyone in the conversation. Whether it happens online or in the office. Especially for larger organisations the only way to do this is to hold a meeting.
Meeting about strategy
Whether it be about the new PR strategy or an important meeting about where to open your new customer call centre, it is something that requires meeting face-to-face (or screen-to-screen, if that’s even a saying). You often hear that executives need to get together to discuss a strategic meeting beforehand. Why? The answer is usually: “To be able to include remote workers in the discussion”. Well, next time try to use an online meeting platform like Drum which doesn’t require anything other than a web browser and a meeting URL for your remote workers to join the meeting. This way your strategy meetings won’t require pointless pre-meetings, and people won’t lose track of conversation which might happen when communicating only via email.
Meeting about a project
Bringing together people from different departments or even different companies is vital in order to be able to brainstorm, plan, execute and review projects. If the project is digital, why not hold the project meeting online! Especially in the design and execution phase communicating via email can be too inefficient, but holding an online meeting will help you tackle all the potential issues and allow people to pitch in their ideas there and then. All the different individuals participating in the project most likely would love the idea of not having to travel to another city just to have their cool idea turned down by an uncooperative designer.
Anything else?
All the above types of important meeting include the following: information sharing, planning, decision making and problem solving. These aspects can describe an important meeting. In the end, however, the main thing to consider is: How much does this affect the business? And more importantly: Can this be covered with an email?
We have only included few types of important meetings that happen inside the organisation. Thus, we didn’t talk about for example meetings with shareholders or potential clients/partners. It is given that these types of meetings are important since they can have a huge impact in your business. If you wonder how you can help your clients or partners to prepare for an important web meeting, you can check our simple tips.
Especially in today’s world where the majority of your employees might be remote workers, it is vital to only hold meetings and online meetings that are important. You might hold solely important meetings with significant topics, but the meetings might not seem to reach their objectives. If you face productivity issues in your meetings, try our tips on how to increase web meeting productivity.
