Eliminate Unnecessary Meetings Take an honest and objective look at your organizations meetings. You will likely find that a lot of meetings arent necessary. Ask these questions about your meetings: • Is it just a habit? Many regular meetings have no objective. • Is there a specific purpose for this meeting? • Is there a defined agenda with a stated goal? • Will the result of the meeting have a measurable outcome? • Are there one or more decisions that need to be made? • Will the decision-makers be in attendance? Consider placing this list, or something like it, in your conference room(s)! Eliminating unnecessary meetings will allow you more time to focus on making the important ones better. Make Meetings Efficient and Effective Certain meetings are necessary. Projects must be managed, decisions must be made, and people need to be apprised of important information. If only 15% of meetings are effective, how do you make sure yours are part of that group? The best way is by using visuals. SmartDraw gives you the tools to do this with a variety of easy to use flowcharts, graphs and other templates that will improve the efficiency and productivity of your meetings. Visual communication using SmartDraw has been shown to reduce meeting times by as much as 25%. Effective meetings use a visual agenda that allows you to build action items in real time. This process is known as live information capture and will produce results that are up to six times more effective than communicating with words alone. Here are some simple tips that will help make your meetings more effective and efficient. 1. To communicate effectively - visually - use a conference room projector or connect attendees via computer using an online meeting platform such as WebExTM or GoToMeetingTM. 2. Have an agenda prepared ahead of time. According to a survey conducted by Microsoft®, 63% of meetings in the US dont have a prepared agenda! Make sure that the agenda is structured around what you want to accomplish, rather than following a rote format. Make the agenda interactive through the use of visuals. Below is an example of an interactive, visual agenda for a product launch created in about a minute using SmartDraw. 3. Share the agenda with other attendees in advance. Elicit feedback and make sure everyone is clear on the purpose and goal of the meeting. In the above agenda, the discussion items are clearly defined. Those attending are made aware - in advance - that decisions will be made, responsibilities will be assigned, and completion dates will be set. 4. Document decisions, tasks and assignments during the meeting. Assign action items to each person right on the visual agenda in real time. Everyone in the meeting sees the action item assigned. There is no room for different interpretations of action taken and the person assigned the task is publicly accountable for completing it. Here is an Assignment View of the visual agenda being created in real time.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 14:24:47 +0000
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