Effective Meetings

Do you spend a large amount of your working time in either your own or other people’s meetings? This half day workshop focuses on how to make that time as productive as possible.

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Overview

Many people spend a huge amount of their time in meetings and yet there is often the feeling that real work only takes place outside of this space. This workshop focuses on best practices and frameworks to make meetings more effective, productive, and even enjoyable.

Before the session, each participant is asked to assess the effectiveness of the meetings they attend or run against a short list of criteria. This analysis is brought along to the workshop and participants use it as a basis for logging learning and action points from the different sessions, culminating with a set of commitments to take back to work.

The workshop itself is a packed and participative half day. Much of the best practice content will be shared and generated by the participants themselves, who will then be challenged to work out how to continue to apply it consistently in the meetings they are involved with, whether in person, virtual or hybrid. Some simple frameworks for meeting design will also be explored, along with techniques for managing meeting behaviours.

Objectives

This workshop aims to positively impact the level of productivity of meetings that are in your sphere of influence within your organisation. The specific objectives are:

  1. To surface best practices and raise your level of commitment to carry them out in your organisation
  2. To equip you to be more confident and skilled in how you structure and run a meeting
  3. To support you in participate fully in all meetings

Course Content

The basics of effective meetings

  • Reflecting on your experiences of attending meetings
  • What makes a meeting excellent
  • Key success factors before, during and after a meeting
  • The ‘Hamburger’ model for effective meetings

Managing meetings

  • Good meeting design
  • Opening up and closing down structure and techniques
  • Decision making in meetings
  • Problem behaviours and how to deal with them

Closing session

  • What are you personally going to do to make a difference to the meetings you are involved with, either as the chair or a participant?
  • How can you influence best practice more widely in your organisation?