A good meeting or a bad meeting is most often the deciding factor of business growth. To have professional meetings that meet your needs, hire a meeting facilitator to help you through.
Success lies in all the details – project details, meeting details, and business details. The key to organizing an effective meeting is hiring a professional. Yes, for an executive meeting that requires more than presentations and boardrooms, it is a facilitator who will get the job done.
Meeting facilitation helps in sticking to the agenda, reaching a consensual conclusion, and drafting a concrete plan action. A facilitator is the one who recognizes detailing, thus making the meeting informational, comfortable, and enjoyable for all your esteemed delegates.
Hiring a planner will save you hours of hassles. Apart from that, a responsible person hired for this specific job will look through all your needs and ensure that all your expectations are met.
Often, people attending the meetings have never met before. Therefore, to start the flow of dialog, ice breaking games or energizers can be effective. The start of any meeting should be with an introduction of the attendees and the gist of the agenda. While the end should be a conclusion and a potential definite result.
Planning a professional meeting demands more preparedness than what a birthday party does. Begin with earmarking the resources that you’ll need to put the meet together.
Thinking that the budget is flexible will be like taking a shortcut to failure. The hallmark of an effective facilitator is the optimum utilization of resources.
The five M’s of management need a detailed check. Work out the men, materials, money, machines and methods to be utilized, within your financial limits. This will make the logistics and costings clearer, thereby reconciling the limited resources with the unlimited demands of your clients.
Poor location will ruin all your efforts. While selecting a location, keep the demographics in mind. A good location brings in an energized feeling to the meeting. If the meeting turns out to be unfruitful, the delegates will be grateful to at least have a beautiful location to enjoy.
Incorporate some recreational activities like table-tennis, swimming, cards, or a pool table at the venue. A well equipped recreational area will provide a good room for relaxation.
Make an agenda and convey the same to the attendees. The aim should be to achieve the predetermined objectives. Time cannot be replenished and hence it needs to be respected. Time before and time during the meeting is crucial, so use it well. It cannot be wasted, as every minute is costing you big money.
If it’s a 2-3 days conference or a weeklong event, then you will have to arrange for their stay in hotels or at the venue. Make an analysis of the finances that you’ll need for this purpose. See to it that deserving employees are rewarded.
SPELL CHECK the names that you’d be putting on the certificates and trophies. An error in the name is rude and sends out a negative impression of the company.
The planner must draw out a plan of everything that will go into conducting the meet. Get a copy of the slide shows and presentations beforehand, so that you can run prior checks.
Make backup copies of these materials for contingency sake. Arrange all the documents in the order of their need. A good meeting always has a smooth communication system.
Miscommunication leads to poor time management which will sabotage the whole essence of the meet. Sometimes there are good meetings and sometimes there are bad ones.
The bad ones often make us wonder what the point of the meet was and were we really there? To conclude a meeting, you definitely don’t need Monica Geller. All you need is a sound mind, to manage the 5 M’s of magnificent meetings.