3 Items to Send out before Your Next Big Meeting

What makes for a successful meeting? It’s not how many people attend, or how long the meeting runs – it’s how actively everyone is engaged, and what can be accomplished during the meeting and afterwards. But too many meetings are often run without a clear agenda or direction. When meetings drag on without direction, participants quickly lose interest and stop engaging causing the meeting to devolve into a waste of everyone’s time.

Success is decided before your meeting begins

The truth is that a meeting’s success is often determined before it even begins. Your participants are more likely to engage in a meeting if they know what’s expected of them and where the project is going. Having a clear game plan pushes everyone into action, driving productivity and innovation for the entire company. By planning, you can steer every important meeting towards a successful outcome.

Meetings are run without an agenda 63% of the time 

Americans hold 11 million meetings each day. And of those 11 million, 63% are conducted without a pre-planned agenda. No agenda means no planning, which is an unprofessional way to run any meeting. Important topics may be forgotten, trivial topics will drag on longer than needed, and participants will feel like their time is being wasted. But a well-planned meeting will flow smoothly down the list of agenda topics. Participants will pay close attention as the meeting progresses, and they’ll feel that their own input is necessary and valuable. In the end, taking just a few moments to pre-plan can save an untold amount of time and can increase productivity tremendously. 

Three items to send out before important meetings

Pre-meeting planning is a simple but critical step. Here are the three most useful items you should send out before any important meeting.

1.    Meeting Agenda

Create a detailed agenda to send to participants before the meeting. The agenda should include the meeting goal, the participant roles, and a list of topics to be discussed. Send out the agenda at least 48 hours before the meeting takes place so that participants will have time to review it and prepare their own updates. As your meetings continue, you can save time by using the same agenda template again and again.

2.    Supporting Documentation

Distribute any support materials at least 24 hours in advance of the meeting. These materials should give enough information to provide adequate background and general familiarity with the topic to be discussed. Try to keep these materials concise and relevant.

3.    Objective Reminder

On the day of the meeting, send out a brief reminder of the goal of the upcoming meeting. When people are busy or are pulled between different projects, it helps to refresh their memory before the meeting, so they don’t come into it completely cold. You’ll spend less time explaining the background and the goals of your meeting, and more time collaborating. This notification can also serve as a reminder for participants to have materials ready for content sharing to enrich the discussion. Having a wireless collaboration system like Mersive Solstice makes it easy share content given that it allows any number of participants to share content at the same time – driving collaboration and meeting productivity.

Pre-planning drives business success

Great companies don’t just hope for success; they plan for it. Important meetings are the same. With better meeting pre-planning, you’ll see proactive engagement from team members, driving greater success for your project and your company. 

About Us: Mersive’s Solstice wireless collaboration solution boosts productivity by putting content at the center of the meeting experience. Participants are more engaged because Solstice’s intuitive, software-based interface makes it easy for any number of users to share content from any device. Moreover, corporations and universities can securely deploy the solution across locations and centrally manage them from a single console. Learn more about Mersive.