How to plan a successful business meeting

A Successful Business Meeting:

A Business meeting is quite important for business success. Because the business meeting is a very powerful and effective tool to communicate the business objectives, activities, and roles assigned to the employees. That’s why it is very important to plan a successful business meeting.

Interestingly, planning a meeting with employees also communicate positive sentiments to them. Because they feel they are valued and trusted by the organization. Therefore, it can be only possible when you plan a successful business meeting. Only a successful business meeting is able to achieve all its purposes and can effectively support small business or even international business.

Luckily, this blog is going to share the most effective process of planning a successful business meeting. You just need to make sure that each step in the process is followed accurately. You can save it as a checklist and just go through it before starting a meeting to ensure that each step in the process is followed or not.

So, in this way, you can plan a successful business meeting by saving your and other’s precious time along with getting beneficial output. Moreover, the below-mentioned checklist is extracted from a Harvard Business Review article.

Checklist of Planning a Business Meeting:

Keep it in mind that the more you will work on before going into the business meeting rooms the more it will be productive and successful. So, You need to think and do more before planning and starting a business meeting. Don’t skip reading and be with us to know more.

1) What’s the Purpose of meeting

It’s a very basic thing you must consider while thinking to plan a business meeting. Therefore, it is in your mind but still, you need to write it properly along with the goals you want to want to accomplish from that purpose. For example, you want to plan a business meeting to get feedback, to make a decision, to identify a problem, to solve a problem, to communicate about an activity, to give information, and many more, So, the first process is to ask yourself “Did you identify the purpose of the meeting?”

2) Is there Anything Better than Meeting

Surprisingly, to accomplished a purpose, there are also other effective ways available. So, after identifying the purpose think about the alternative ways for it. If there are other channels of communication available that can work more effectively in this context. Then You must go for that to accomplish your goal.

You can also skip to other alternatives if you have no time to plan an effective meeting, if you are deal a sensitive issue (like church business meeting), in personnel personal issues, or you just want to communicate with a few employees. Because in these types of situations one-to-one interactions are more effective.

You can go for a meeting if your goal is different from these, Now the meeting is the best option.

3) Design Meeting Agenda

The next important step for you is to design a preliminary structure or agenda for the meeting. Here you can list all the points you want to discuss in the meeting. In this way, you can also prioritize the meeting sequence along with setting the time duration for each one.

After designing a preliminary agenda you can mold it according to the best practices of business meetings. For example, if it’s too short you can add more, if it’s too long you can eliminate the unnecessary and less considerable things to make it effective. In the same way, you can judge your meeting agenda from all aspects to make it perfect. So, it can be able to lead a successful business meeting.

4) Select Most-relevant Participants

The next important thing is selecting the right, most relevant, and interested employees as a participant. This step is more important and significant because the participants are the key source to attain the purpose of the meeting.

That’s why you need to select the right person to participate to get more productive outcomes. However, you add the most creative people in the meeting in order to get the best brainstorming ideas and solutions.  Therefore, you must ensure their presence because their presence is the most important thing.

5) Assign Participants with their roles

It is very important to plan the roles of selected participants. You must inform the participants about their roles before the meeting room. Because they must prepare themselves according to the assigned roles before the meeting.

If you are going to plan a meeting for the first time then you must consider these roles for example facilitator, scribe, timekeeper, expert, contributor, transcriber, and many more according to your niche.

6) Business Meeting Venues And Time

After assigning roles to the participants of the meeting, the next important thing for you is to plan the meeting location and time. It is important because in this way you can ensure the availability of all participants after sending them the information regarding it.

In the same way, the other participants can easily mold their schedule according to that ensure their availability. Interestingly, you must also mention if you want to hold a virtual meeting (join skype for business meeting and Zoho meeting).

Read more about Business management: What is Business Management?

7) Send the invitation letters to participants

After finalizing each and everything, you can send invitation letters to the participants. Here you need to mention the preliminary business meeting agenda, meeting time, place, and mode. Moreover, you must ask the readers to reply to the letter to confirm their availability.

Additionally, you can also send attachments with the letter if needed. For example, if you want to make a decision or to solve a problem, you can attach the relevant readers, reports and other stuff. It will help the participants to prepare themselves accordingly and effectively.

8) Key Points to consider to plan a successful meeting

Therefore, apart from the above-mentioned points, some other points need to be discussed here.

• Identify the process which will be followed in the meeting for example  leader choice, group consensus, and so on.
• Ensure the availability of types of equipment that are needed for the meetings before the meeting.
• Replace the person if someone is unable to participate.
• You must also follow the whole preliminary agenda and processes to ensure that you are also able to hold a meeting along with completing it successfully.

9) Write Minutes of Meeting During Meeting

It is also a very important part of the meeting to write the minutes of the meeting. Because it works as a record and information that can be used anytime by a business to solve the similar type of issues.

You should not only keep it with yourself but also you should share it with the participants. You must follow up email after business meeting. So, they can follow up the meeting points effectively. It is helpful because most of the time we missed or forget the small things while performing on the assigned roles.

So, to avoid this and for the safe side, you must record the minutes of the meeting and then distribute it among the meeting participants. Additionally, you can also save business meeting images for future meetings.