When it comes to how to run a meeting, whether remote or physical, there are key components that must be considered in order to make sure the meeting is successful. A successful meeting is vital when it comes to achieving goals, making decisions, and increasing productivity, it assures that all participants are aligned.
Meetings are an important part of any organization, yet they can be frustrating, unproductive, and cause attendees to become disengaged if not planned properly. Arguably, meeting planning is the most important stage of any company meeting cycle, if this is done poorly, the meeting itself and overall culture will suffer. We have put together a meeting preparation checklist to help you plan your meetings effectively.
Whether you are running virtual meetings on Zoom, in-person, or over the phone, there are important aspects that need to be considered in order to plan a meeting successfully, these include:
If you're growing a company or leading a team, it's important to have a strong meeting culture. Good meeting culture ensures that everyone is on the same page, communication is clear, and decisions are made efficiently. Unfortunately, not all teams have good meeting culture. In fact, many teams struggle with ineffective meetings that waste time, energy, and even money.
When a company meeting culture is varied, poor, or simply not fit for purpose, it will have a major impact on the business. Poor meeting culture will lead to misalignment, miscommunication, frustration, and even conflict among team members. This will lead to difficulties in making decisions, achieving goals, and completing everyday tasks.
Large corporations address meeting culture by incorporating unconventional methods into their meeting practices. For example, Facebook has a "no meeting" day every Wednesday, which allows employees to have uninterrupted time to work on their projects. Virgin Atlantic Airways holds "walking meetings," where employees take a walk around the block while they discuss business. Other companies encourage standing meetings, which have been shown to improve focus and efficiency.
Not every company gets this right though, for example, Google's meetings are notorious for being "unproductive." The company has even been known to hire outside consultants to help improve the meeting culture.
While these methods may not be practical for every team, it's important to understand that meeting culture is important and impact every aspect of your team.
Over the years we have grown to consider meeting culture consisting of three distinct parts:
Late meetings are a common occurrence in many workplaces. They can have a significant impact on productivity and cost businesses money. Whether it's physical office meetings or video meetings on platforms like zoom, team lateness can be frustrating for everyone involved.
Most businesses are unaware of how much money meeting punctuality is costing them, and those that are aware, are not measuring lateness effectively. There are easy steps that can be taken, and tools (such as Flowtrace), that can be used to measure and improve meeting punctuality.
More than half (56%) of all employees admit failing to attend meetings and other work events on time at least once a week.
Video meetings have surged since the pandemic hit back in 2020, and with good reason. They’re an easy way to hold meetings and communicate with co-workers, clients, and customers without having to leave your home, or now, the office. In particular, Zoom has become one of the most used software platforms for video meetings, and with the introduction of Flowtrace Zoom analytics, teams can now optimise those meetings for efficiency.
After managing a number of small and medium-sized teams in different industries, my main management focus was on standard company performance metrics. This would include in-person quarterly reviews, sales figures, and measuring task completion rates.
Managers know that meeting feedback is important, but it's not always easy to collect. Feedback can be vague and unhelpful, or it can be so specific that it's difficult to take action on. In this blog post, we'll discuss a few tips for collecting feedback that's both useful and actionable. By following these tips, you'll be able to improve your meetings and make them more productive for everyone involved!
Remote work was already increasing year on year before the pandemic, and it is now estimated that nearly 20% of the global workforce work remotely on a full time basis. The pandemic shifted our work paradigm tremendously and quickly, even companies who didn’t believe in any benefits of remote working had no choice but to embrace remote working. So how do you collaborate effectively as a remote team and how do you build a strong remote team culture?.
For many organizations, having to adjust so quickly to a different way of working presented new opportunities and provided a silver lining during difficult and unprecedented times.
Many organizations discovered that remote working wasn’t scary.
Many organizations discovered that remote working increased productivity.
Many organizations discovered that although remote team communication can present challenges, it isn’t a blocker to success.
Whether you’re an employer thinking about maintaining a remote working strategy, whether you are considering remote team communication as part of a hybrid working model or whether you are a team manager with a remote team, there’s a lot you can learn about how to create a strong remote team culture. In this article we will explore remote team communication strategies and share tips to improve remote team culture.
As a growing company, it is important to set the company culture from the offset. Understanding how your employees feel and their value, helps to direct the company into a functional and effective team, and sets a basis for all future employees. Using free Slack eNPS (employee net promoter score) for mood tracking can help with this process.
A virtual work life can be hard to manage. Achieving a healthy work-life balance is essential.
Part of finding a good balance is to address the problem of virtual meeting overload. By reducing meeting overload, you'll be able to manage your time better and avoid the stress of remote meetings.
In this article, we'll take a look at some ways to overcome meeting overload and virtual meeting fatigue. Hopefully, these tips can help you ensure a more productive and balanced team meeting culture.