09 Feb How to Overcome Meeting Challenges
By: Megan Jones
We’ve all had those meetings that should have been emails and emails that should have been meetings. Although time consuming, meetings are essential to providing information and clarification to employees. It may seem simple but there are plenty of challenges to hosting or attending a meeting. In today’s world we may experience more meetings virtually, which has its own set of challenges. Therefore, in order to have an effective meeting it is important to overcome these meeting challenges. Here are some tips and tricks to bring to your next meeting!
What are Meeting Challenges?
Meeting challenges are any inhibitors to hosting or attending a meeting. These challenges affect how successful and productive the meeting is. Meetings take away from employees completing their projects and assigned tasks therefore, when hosting a meeting you want to ensure that it is productive, and employees walk away feeling like they gained insight from attending.
Challenges
Meeting Length:
If you are the one hosting, ensure you schedule an appropriate length of time. You do not want employees to block off a large chunk of time for a quick meeting. Reversely, you do not want to host a short meeting, that overruns its allotted time. If you are the host, prepare yourself with the appropriate materials, from there schedule time for you to discuss your information and then leave a buffer for questions.
If you are attending meetings, ensure you also don’t commit to back-to-back meetings. Being late to one meeting will make you late to the next and the domino effect continues. Schedule 15-minute breaks in between each meeting so you have time should a meeting run long and if you need to do anything in-between meetings. If you must schedule back-to-back meetings, let the hosts know your schedule and if you will have to leave early or be a few minutes late.
“Room” Size
If you are hosting an in-person meeting, ensure you have the appropriate room size. In today’s world that may mean you need a bigger size to have attendees socially distance from each other. If you pick too small of a room, employees may feel crammed, and it will affect their likelihood to pay attention and retain the information being presented.
If you are hosting a virtual meeting, ensure your platform can withstand the audience you have. It can be distracting to have members leave, audio to lag, and calls to drop.
Timing
If you are attending a meeting please be on time. It is distracting for other members if people are constantly coming in or leaving. This holds true for virtual calls as well!
Information
The purpose of most meetings is to provide information or give direction. But you should ensure you are not providing too little information (that the meeting doesn’t need to occur) or too much information (information overload). If you provide too much information, it can be exhausting to continually pay attention and difficult to retain.
If you are hosting a meeting with a lot of information, print out outlines or key notes and takeaways for attendees to look back at.
Repetitive Meetings
Once you have provided the information, there should not be consequent meeting follow-ups. This can be frustrating to you and the attendees to continually must discuss the same topic without any new updates. Again, employees carve out time that takes away from their work to attend, ensure you are utilizing their time appropriately.
Good Luck in your next meeting we know it will be a productive one!
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