Engaging in business meetings

Every business, whether it has two employees or 2,000, has meetings as a regular part of getting things done. Although employees can communicate with one another in an organisation in many different ways, business meetings — if they are conducted the right way — can be incredibly effective and efficient.

A business meeting is quite simply a gathering, or group meeting online, of individuals working together in some capacity. These people come together to discuss business issues about which they need to come to agreement, or other business issues that need time and attention. In the meeting, there is generally someone leading the discussions to help facilitate reaching a desired end result. Others may take charge of specific sections of the meeting, as necessary but there is almost always one person who is in charge of the meeting itself.

There are few things that can fray the nerves quite like a business meeting where work and earnings hang in the balance. In order to get a grasp on yourself during this time of high pressure, plan ahead and anticipate the worst that could happen in order to know how to jump in and solve anything.

What are the requirements of a business meeting?

A business meeting today can mean so many different things. It can mean twenty people meeting in a boardroom, or it can mean three people meeting at a coffee shop to discuss business in an informal way. Or a business meeting can be many people from across the globe gathering online to use remote desktop and online conferencing software to work on a project interactively. The use of desktop sharing technology enables people to meet online and share screen content live over the web in real-time, while chatting via voice conferencing.

Web conferencing and online meetings are a much less costly solution for getting the work accomplished. Twenty years ago, these people would all need to gather at a central location to make things happen. Thanks to the development of remote access and online meeting software applications, business gets done efficiently and companies are able to take advantage of the resources that many different people are able to provide for their projects.

The old cliché states that you only get a chance at making a first impression. Although obvious, it’s stated for emphasis. It’s undeniably true, and it’s the reason that you must put a lot of thought and effect in to how you present yourself for a business meeting. Appearance issues don’t matter except when they relate to how your professionalism is displayed and perceived.

Business meetings that matter – it’s possible!

Meetings come in all shapes and sizes. There are the everyday office meetings, board meetings, seminars – all the way up to major conferences. And meetings can now be face-to-face, teleconference, videoconference, or online via the Internet. And when is the last time you heard someone say, “Gee, we need to have more meetings.” There are more than enough meetings to go around these days, and for a good reason. Meetings are more important than ever. Modern workplaces are built on teams, sharing of ideas, and effective project coordination.

If communication is the lifeblood of any organisation, then meetings are the heart and mind. The place where we communicate our ideas, hash them out, share our passion for better or worse, develop new understandings and new directions. It’s where deals can happen or fall apart, where strategies are articulated and debated -- in short -- where we engage with others. That’s what it’s all about, people meeting with people.

Survey results published by the Annenberg School of Communications at UCLA and the University of Minnesota’s Training & Development Research Center show that executives on average spend 40%-50% of their working hours in business meetings. Further evidence of the pervasiveness of meetings comes from a recent issue of Fast Company magazine, where organisational psychologist Jon Ryburg says he advises corporate clients to provide twice as much meeting space as they did 20 years ago.

We’ve all experienced more than our share of both good and bad meetings. What makes some meetings terrific, while others are simply the pits?

Employees benefit in several ways when a meeting is well run. Here’s the good news about business meetings that fall into this category:

• Meetings are empowering.
• Meetings are a great way to communicate.
• Meetings develop work skills and leadership.
• Meetings are morale boosting.

Unfortunately, meetings are prone to fall into non-productive pitfalls. Here’s the negative side of meetings:

• Meetings may not have focus.
• Companies have too many meetings.
• Attendees may be unprepared.
• Most meeting time is wasted.

Although this bad news may seem bleak, there is hope. For each of these problems, and for the many other kinds of problems that often plague business meetings, solutions are available. You simply need to be open to changing the way that meetings are conducted in your organisation. You may even need to take on a leadership role, if necessary, to make your meetings work better.

If you want your business meetings to accomplish their focus to the maximum, then it is time that the organisers stay focused, and clear about the contents to be taken up during the scheduled meeting. Thus a well planned business meeting is one that is planned well in advance and with much thought. Let us now look at some of the key things that come to our mind when deciding of a business meeting.

Where to meet

There are times that you will be left the task of choosing where to meet. This isn’t the case always, but you should be ready to adapt when the responsibility is placed in your hands. By asking a few initial questions when the option is left to you, you’ll be able to have a much more successful meeting.

The most convenient would be to arrange a suitable place in the organisation based on the number of representatives from office or of course the most ideal if all intended participants are from staff. But if you are due to meet a client then it would be wiser to think of a place through mutual agreement.

How to present yourself

Don’t be afraid of being yourself. Simply adapt to how you want to be professionally perceived. Put yourself in the mind of those of you are meeting and you’ll be able to judge for yourself what’s appropriate and what isn’t.

Decide what you want the outcome of the meeting to be. That means more than just hoping to impress and get an account. Know specifics. Set three definite goals that you want to achieve. Perhaps, you want to show the person you’re meeting that you’re accomplished, yet humble. Although that sounds vague, it will be easier to manage than thinking of your overall goal of closing the deal throughout the meeting.

Make the end goal your focus, but have some other important goals to achieve in the meeting as well. Be honest in your business meeting. If you promise more than you can deliver, you’ll end up with poor performance feedback and negative word of mouth, not to mention a botched job. If you cite past work that wasn’t done, you may get stopped in your tracks. It’s ultimately a small world, and a lie will easily come back to haunt you.

What to say

Keep positive. Never bash former employers. Even if your business partner cringes and starts bad talking about an obviously unprofessional past client of yours that you also hate, keep your professional persona.

Think of one positive thing to state about everyone on your resume. If the conversation starts to get there, acknowledge the person’s negative opinion, yet sway gently back in to the positive statement. You’ll then want to change the subject. If you’re not indulging a gossip who wants you to do so, don’t let them focus on that setback. You want to keep all parties engaged throughout a business meeting. It is always best to remember that phrase which says ‘keep it simple, stupid.

Although this bad news may seem bleak, there is hope. For each of these problems, and for the many other kinds of problems that often plague business meetings, solutions are available. You simply need to be open to changing the way that meetings are conducted in your organisation. You may even need to take on a leadership role, if necessary, to make your meetings work better.

Eight ways to make meetings better

Everyone has suffered through far too many meetings that took up far too much time and accomplished far too little. Unfortunately, this sad state of affairs has happened so often that you may find yourself becoming numb to the fact that your meetings aren’t as good as they should be — and could be, if you just had some way to fix them.

Help is close at hand! You can make your meetings better, and you don’t have to tolerate meetings that accomplish little or nothing. The power is within you, whether you are a meeting leader or a participant. Do you want to find out how? Here are some time-tested techniques to ensure better business meetings:

• Be prepared – Meetings are work, so, just as in any other work activity, the better prepared you are for them, the better the results you can expect.
• Have an agenda – An agenda, a list of the topics to be covered during the course of a meeting — can play a critical role in the success of any meeting. It shows participants where they are going, but it’s then up to the participants to figure out how to get there. Be sure to distribute the agenda and any pre-work in advance. By distributing the agenda and pre-work before the meeting, participants can prepare for the meeting ahead of time. As a result, they will be immediately engaged in the business of the meeting, and they’ll waste far less time throughout the meeting.
• Start on time and end on time – Everyone has suffered through meetings that went way beyond the scheduled ending time. That situation would be fine if no one had anything else to do at work. But in these days of faster and more flexible organisations, everyone always has plenty of work on the to-do list. If you announce the length of the meeting and then stick to it, fewer participants will keep looking at their watches, and more participants will take an active role in your meetings.
• Have fewer (but better) meetings – Call a meeting only when it is absolutely necessary. Before you call a meeting, ask yourself whether you can achieve your goal in some other way, perhaps through a one-on-one discussion with someone in your organisation, a telephone conference call, or a simple exchange of e-mail. As you reduce the number of meetings you have, be sure to improve their quality.
• Include, rather than exclude – Meetings are only as good as the ideas that the participants bring forward. Great ideas can come from anyone in an organisation, not just its managers. Roy Disney, Vice Chairman of the Walt Disney Company, tells a great story that illustrates this point perfectly. Says Disney, “There’s an old story about Walt from the early days when we were making short subjects — really just a collection of gags. Every week, Walt had a gag contest, and everybody was free to enter — the winner got $5, which was a lot of money during the Depression. And who kept winning, week after week? The janitor. You see, it’s not about who’s the boss. It’s about who’s got the best ideas.”

• Maintain the focus – Meetings can easily get off track and stay off track. The result? Meetings do not achieve their goals. Meeting leaders and participants must actively work to keep meetings focused on the agenda items. Topics should not include the results of the latest football game, or who had lunch with whom, or who’s driving that shiny new Porsche. Whenever you see the meeting drifting off track, speak up and push the other attendees to get it back in focus.
• Capture and assign action items – Unless they are held purely to communicate information, or for other special purposes, most meetings result in action items, tasks, and other assignments for one or more participants. Don’t assume that all participants are going to take their assignments to heart and remember all the details. Instead, be sure that someone has agreed to take on the job of record keeping. Immediately after the meeting, summarise the outcome of the meeting, as well as assignments and timelines, and e-mail a copy of this summary to all attendees.
• Get feedback – Every meeting has room for improvement. Be sure to solicit feedback from meeting attendees on how the meeting went right for them — and how it went wrong. Was the meeting too long? Did one person dominate the discussion? Were attendees unprepared? Were the items on the agenda unclear? Whatever the problems, you can’t fix them if you don’t know about them. You can use a simple form to solicit feedback, or you can simply informally speak with attendees after the meeting to get their input.

Thanks to the immediacy of the Internet, the image we all think of when we hear the words, business meeting, can be erased from our memory forever. After all, most people do not relish the idea of sitting in a crowded conference room next to a sneezing co-worker for hours on end while many topics that do not necessarily apply to each person in the room are discussed. Today’s business meetings are completely different than those of the past.

However a business meeting irrespective of its scale must achieve its target whether it is the launch of new proposals, exploring market opportunities and simply a discussion with a prospective client. It is essential important not to make it an opportunity for gossip and another traditional discussion-but to make the most of it through pre-preparation. Therefore it is important that meetings are managed so that we will not have to condone with the statement “A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted” – James T. Kirk.

(The writer is the Managing Director and CEO, McQuire Rens Group of Companies. He has held regional responsibilities of two multinational companies of which one was a Fortune 500 company. He carries out consultancy assignments and management training in Dubai, India, Maldives, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. He is a much sought-after business consultant and corporate management trainer in Sri Lanka.)

Engaging in business meetings