4 tips to get the most out of your meetings

Encourage discussion, sharing and get everyone to speak… these are all levers to combine collective intelligence and individual well-being for your staff.To activate them, why not start by transforming your meetings?Managers spend an average of 16 years of their lives in them. This is a considerable amount of time which comes in response to the growing need by employees to work together, but is time which unfortunately is often poorly used.At Klaxoon, we are sure that meetings provide a unique opportunity to enable your team to collaborate effectively and are a vital tool with which the greatest care must be taken.Here are our 4 tips for you to put in place now and which could change everything in your professional life.

1. Make sure you don’t waste time unnecessarily

A study carried out by Klaxoon in the United States in June 2017 shows that 67% of people questioned stated that they wanted more teamwork.Despite this, many studies reveal that meetings are generally seen as being too long.One of the solutions to limit meeting times while meeting employees’ needs to get together is to track the minutes lost and optimise the time spent in meetings.There are two practices which can be implemented very easily to achieve this.

Start the meeting on time

This first recommendation will come as a surprise to no-one: to make sure that a meeting doesn’t go on forever, it’s best that everyone arrives on time. The best way to get people to turn up at the set meeting time is for them to want to be there.Put the following tips into action now!

Get each person to prepare the meeting

Making the team able to collaborate from the start of the meeting requires each person to arrive knowing what the meeting’s actually about, or even that they have already though about the subject to be discussed. And yet a tool like email doesn’t necessarily enable a manager to make sure that everyone knows the information in advance. How can they check that emails have actually been read, for example? With Klaxoon, these difficulties can now be overcome. One of our activities enables you to send content very easily before the meeting, providing a host of advantages over email, without taking more time:

• You can mix different types of content: text, photos, videos and more.
• You can integrate questions and take note of the answers from the people you sent them to. This is a real plus in enabling you to find out before the meeting what are the participants’ expectations or how much they know about the subject.
• You can find out who consulted your content.

And what’s the name of this activity that you should test out as soon as possible? The Capsule.

2. Make your team meetings more participatory

Did you know that participants spend 70% of their time in meetings not paying attention? This percentage is worrying, but it can be explained by neuroscience. In fact, it has been proven that we are physiologically incapable of concentrating for more than 20 minutes. When faced with this human constraint, the tip for keeping your meetings useful is to keep grabbing participants’ attention and increase the level of interaction.

During your meetings, get your participants to react from start to finish. Ask them for their opinions, test their knowledge or get them to vote! Adopt good participative management practices.

These are practices which have always been around (round table, voting by show of hands, etc.) but which sometimes come up against practical implementation difficulties, such as the time they take or that some participants don’t like speaking in public.

Klaxoon solves these problems once and for all, since all participants respond to the quiz, survey or vote activities at the same time. You can create a quiz or survey easily and start voting straight away. Everyone says what they think, including the shier participants or the people participating by remote. The team interacts with you and each other, decisions are made naturally and the projects move forward.

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3. Have shorter meetings

You now know that introducing interaction into your meetings will make them more effective. Your team will be more engaged and committed, continue to pay attention and take more decisions.But why not go even further still by completely overhauling your meeting agendas?

Today, sharing more information and more knowledge has become essential. It is a lever for collective performance and is a need expressed by teams. So why not test out the daily now?This is a new format of very short, daily meetings where each team member briefly tells their colleagues about the key points of their activity: actions carried out the day before, current projects, help needed and so on.

They express their ideas verbally or, for optimum team progress monitoring, in a Klaxoon Board. The brainstorming report will be generated automatically.Why not try it out tomorrow morning and get your team together for coffee?

4. Think about ROTI

ROTI (Return on Time Invested), which comes from the Agile methodology, involves measuring a meeting’s effectiveness at the end and asking the participants to evaluate it on a scale from 1 to 5.

This technique will enable you to keep check on how useful your meetings are by getting feedback from your participants and initiating a continuous improvement loop. You can put this evaluation system in place very easily by carrying out a live vote by show of hands (each person raises a finger for each point they want to give the meeting). To make sure the more shy members of your team don’t worry about this exercise, Klaxoon has designed an activity to be launched in a few seconds, the live vote, which enables each person to evaluate the meeting without needing to speak out loud.

So there you have it! You know have a few very simple techniques to revolutionize your meetings gently but surely. Over to you.