Everyone should have the opportunity to improve at work. If you participate in meetings at work, you should know that they are very important for your development at work. There are certain steps to follow in the culture of meetings that can make the time easier for you. Also this will make you transform things in quality of work and meetings.
It is not nice or beneficial not to know how to take advantage of these meeting moments to get your doubts out or learn. These meetings should be a place for you to be more efficient in the short and long term. They can shape you into a productive and valuable person for your position. If you want to know how to be this kind of person I recommend you to read the following article.
Most Important
- Meeting culture can be defined as a set of meetings with their benefits or problems.
- Knowing the culture of meetings is extremely important. If this is not known or carried out, workers become unproductive.
- There are certain particular characteristics that hint that there is a flaw in the meeting culture.
8 tips to improve your company’s meeting culture
There are certain ways to make a meeting enjoyable, productive and effective. All the mistakes I characterized above can be solved and that is precisely why below I will give you some tips on how to do it. We will try to make them as effective and simple as possible so that you can put them into practice.
1. Planning
To achieve planning you can choose different methods that are effective in having our meeting organized from day 1. You can make agendas, virtual or on paper, in order to organize everything that will happen in the meeting and when everything will take place. You could even share this agenda with all the future attendees of the meeting, so they can also keep an order in their participation.
Planning is a tool that will always be welcome to any person and job. Planning is a key stage in the development of different tasks, since it determines presence and responsibility. A person who is planned, has his tasks and meetings up to date and written down will be much more effective than one who does not. This implies that a person who has the quality of planning could be very valuable (5).
2. Optimization
To achieve meeting culture optimization you must follow certain patterns. These are the same ones that will make the meetings to be the best used as possible, in an appropriate time. If we talk about optimizing the hours that a meeting is going to have, we can deduce that the most extensive and also the biggest meetings are usually the most expensive.
Meetings of the type mentioned above are characterized by a bad use of time. This is because people will not find it useful and will believe that they wasted their time. On the other hand, if we focus on meetings that are shorter or of shorter duration and even if fewer people participate, there may be a better use of time and of the meeting in general.
3. Hold meetings more often
Holding meetings more often will get people in the habit of participating in them and constantly learning. People will always be trained and updated for different tasks and will be able to improve their performance at work. By being in repetitive meetings they will be able to know how the organization is and how one of them is carried out, so that in the future they will be able to do the same (2).
Meetings do not necessarily have to be long, the more often a meeting is held the less time it will take, since it is the introduction of information a little at a time and not an accumulation of ideas and strategies from one day to the next. This can be beneficial since the employee will learn a little bit every day and will be effective daily in their tasks to be fulfilled.
4. Generate learning habits
As I said before, learning little by little can be beneficial for everyone, now how can we do it? To have an organization and generate learning habits we must be aware of everything before entering the meeting.
We should check e-mails, participate in the groups where doubts are solved and where the topic of the day is presented to us. We can look for information in a self-taught way (valuable) to be prepared for the meeting and get rid of doubts about what we have read.
5. Participation
If you want the people in the meeting to have the opportunity to participate, you should keep in mind that the group should be reduced so that this is more likely to happen. You can also give people the option to write down the doubts they have during the meeting, so that they can solve them in an orderly manner.
I also consider that if the person who is going to the meeting is not really in the mood or ready to participate, he/she should leave his/her place to another person who is. This will motivate everyone, since there will be a good working environment and everyone will want to listen attentively and be part of the meeting (1).
6. Demonstrate interest
For this you can classify questions of greater importance over those of lesser importance, highlight the topics that are not clear to you and write down examples to solve your doubts.
The people giving the meeting will want you to learn and be able to demonstrate it, so it is important to pay attention. If you notice that you are not paying attention, try to ask for permission and leave for a minute to take a breath and come back refreshed to get the next information (6).
7. Mistakes
Mistakes can be found when there is no planning, i.e., no prior discussion of the meeting to be held. When meetings are extremely short or extremely long, they lose the thread of the objective and become unsatisfactory for the employees who want to participate in them (4).
In addition, if a person at the end of the talk has doubts and is not given the space to solve them, we could deduce that there is an error in the management and communication that makes the culture of the meetings is bad.
8. Benefits and/or detriments
If we talk about a positive or good meeting, it will give us productive and creative qualities to develop in our place. If we focus on a meeting that does not benefit us, we will not understand the central concept of it and it will not solve any doubt or problem to solve the bad things of our actions.
Workers may present confusion in their tasks and decrease the ability to create and manage the tasks or projects they have to carry out. In order for the culture of meetings to be well known, the people who conduct them must be well informed and prepared (3).
Conclusion
We should all be able to enjoy the culture of meetings in order to have better development in our work. Meetings will be better the more planned and organized they are.
Meetings are super important for people’s contribution, but we can also see that they can generate problems if there is no commitment from these people and unproductivity. Any intervention made in the meeting could be significant for everyone else.
References
1. Microsoft Learn. Transforming the culture of meetings. [Internet] 2022 December 15.(Cited 2022).
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2. National University of Cuyo. Research work “Effective meetings”. [Internet] 2020(Cited 2022).
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3. Organization of American States. Operating manual for the organization of meetings and conferences away from headquarters. [Internet]. 2017 December.(Cited 2022).
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4. Harvard Business Review Press. How to lead business meetings. [Internet]. 2021. (Cited 2022).
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5. Universidad de los Andes. Efficient meetings: How to achieve them [Internet]. 2017. (Cited 2022).
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6. RCM Faculty Development Gilberto Guevara, MBA. Effective Meetings. [Internet]. 2016 May 21. (Cited 2022).
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