5 Tips for a Memorable Meeting

Send an Agenda! 

If a lot has to be covered in a short amount of time, it would be a great idea to send a plan of what needs to be discussed. You could email an agenda to make the timing easier, this way everyone attending will know exactly what needs to be covered and will avoid any confusion! This will just be a brief outline of the meeting, consider using bullet points as not everyone will want to read through a 3-page long meeting outline!  Do you need anyone to bring something to the meeting? Consider setting a reminder for that person alongside the agenda to ensure that it all goes according to plan!

Clear Objectives 

Consider the purpose of the meeting, what is the most important thing that you need to discuss? Think about outlining the key objectives before you start to try and avoid going off on a tangent. Whilst outlining the objectives you could make time to refer to the agenda and the individual assignments you may have handed out before the meeting. This will help to engage everyone, remember this is a meeting not a presentation so you want to encourage as much input and interaction as possible!

Consider the Details 

Consider things like, timing, would your meeting work better in 30 minutes rather than an hour? Is the agenda well structured? Maybe you could assign different topics to different people? This way you could ensure that every person has a say and an involvement in the meeting.

Have you thought about the location of the meeting? Ensure the location is appropriate for the type of meeting you are conducting. Is the meeting informal? If so, you may want to set it around a table or in a more informal setting. Consider what level of interaction is required if the purpose of the meeting is to share information then potentially a class room style set-up would be appropriate. If, however you are wanting to launch something new and interact with the attendees potentially a boardroom style set-up would get you better results.

If you are trying to cover a lot in a small time period, think about allowing time for questions, if you think it will take you 30 minutes to go through all of the objectives allow an extra 20 minutes for questions!

Attendees 

Consider who you have invited and think about who it is relevant to. Does everyone in the office need to be there? Or is it something that just your HR team needs to know about. If there are too many people, there may not be enough time for everyone to be heard!

Review  

Round up the meeting with a summary of what has been spoken about, think about the next steps and make it actionable. If you ask your attendees to do something they are much more likely to remember what was discussed. If you are not conducting the meeting consider taking minutes or notes which could be emailed after, if there was visual information, like a video or PowerPoint you could also send this. Think about emailing a summary of the meeting and follow up any actions which were discussed. Summarising and following up actions can help your meeting have more of an impact on the people who attended.