Effective Online Meetings: 3 Steps to Ensure Productive Meetings
By James Hamby
Online meetings are a staple in today’s high tech business world. However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to take steps to ensure the efficacy and productivity of your meetings. In order to be sure you have the best meetings you can, you want to take steps to set up your online meetings-just as you would for face-to-face meetings.
Step 1: Set an agenda for the meeting.
You need an agenda to make sure that your meetings have a clear purpose and a clear timeline for completion. You want to let people know that you value their time and do not plan to waste it by letting meetings get off track or drag on and on.
Setting your agenda is a critical step in preparation for meetings. You need to spend time thinking about all of the items your team will need to consider and discuss. You may need to make a list of materials that you or other team members will need to bring and share with the team at the time of the meeting.
Once you have set your agenda, send it out to the attendees so they can prepare any materials they need to. Just this step alone will greatly enhance the productivity of your meetings.
You can decide whether or not to ask for feedback on the agenda. There may be meetings that you send out drafts of your agenda to your attendees, who may add items or details to the agenda. This is especially appropriate when you are meeting to follow-up or setting a meeting for a phase of a team project.
Step 2: Reserve the meeting time.
You want to make sure you have a day and time for your meeting that is appropriate for your attendees. It’s difficult to hold a meeting without all of your key players present.
Once you have established a day and time for the meeting, then you can begin really nailing down your plans. If you have received feedback on a draft of an agenda, then you may take this time to nail down your finalized agenda and send that out to attendees.
Step 3: Schedule your meeting with your web conferencing provider and send invitations.
The complexity of this step will largely depend on your web conferencing provider. Some web conferencing providers allow you to schedule meetings with a single click and it will automatically send invitations to your attendees. Other programs require much more complicated maneuvering.
Once you have scheduled your meeting and sent out invitations, you can turn your attention to whatever preparation you need to do personally. Perhaps you have documents or a presentation to prepare.
Online meetings are a tremendous means of saving time and money and increasing team productivity. But in order to ensure the effectiveness of your meetings, you need to conduct these three easy steps ahead of time to make sure everyone’s time is well used.
Learn more steps you can take to help ensure effective online meetings and how your company can take advantage of this amazing new technology to give you the unfair advantage over your competition.
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This reminds me of the concept of online meeting tools like agreedo.com,
great!!!