Managing Meetings Training
Managers complain that 30% of their time in meetings is wasted. Impromptu drop-by meetings also account for a lot of lost working hours. 40% of workers cited impromptu meetings as productivity killers. Poorly called or run meetings, waste valuable time for any organization. The annual cost of bad meetings in the UK has been estimated at a staggering 27 billion pounds. That includes time wasters and the results of poor decisions and ineffective action.
Setting Meeting Objectives
The course discusses how to plan, and set objectives for successful meetings. Other areas such as the location, agenda and planning other aspects of the meeting will be guided by how effective your objectives are. Think about what a good outcome would be. Ask yourself,
- Do I want a decision from this meeting?
- Have something to communicate?
- Do I want to generate ideas?
- Do I intend to make plans?
- Do I want to receive status reports?
Managing Meetings – Preparing the Agenda
Before your meeting starts, you should provide everyone with an agenda. The course shows you how to set your agenda up as the blueprint for a successful meeting.
A well thought out agenda is crucial for any successful meeting. You can use it to make sure you only cover relevant points, and that everything runs smoothly and on time. When you’re preparing an agenda, you should ask yourself the following questions. If you write your answers down, you’re already starting to draft your agenda.
- What do I need to achieve in the meeting?
- Who do I need to invite to make sure it’s a success?
- What topics should I include and in what order?
- How much time should I allocate to each discussion topic?
- When and where will the meeting take place
Participant Engagement and handling disruptive behavior
Here, the course gives strategies on how to achieve good engagement from all participants. We identify problems people encounter when setting up meetings and give ideas on how to deal with them, including disruptive behavior and resolving conflict.
Disruptive behavior can destroy any positive energy flowing through your meeting, leaving everybody feeling frustrated and deflated. This course will give you techniques on how to anticipate disruptive behavior and deal with it before it negatively impacts your meeting.
The type of disruptive personalities we look at are:
- Individuals who argue
- People who try to dominate and
- Those who hold meetings on the side during the main meeting
Managing Meetings – Making Decisions
Many of us find it hard when we’re faced with a difficult decision. The main fear is making the wrong decision. In meetings, there’s a tendency to drag things out, going over every possibility. Sometimes, however, we’re much more certain of the decision that needs to be made, and it is made quickly without looking at other options. Both of these extremes can be avoided by implementing decision making strategies.
The course takes you through various decision making techniques to suit different sets of circumstances you are faced with and identifying those who need to be part of the decision.
After the Meeting
The course gives a guide on how to appraise how well or how badly the meeting went. Central to this is whether the objectives you set out for the meeting were met.
Conducting this type of self analysis will greatly enhance your ability to chair and organise meetings that achieve positive results will improve significantly.
- This useful guide by Zapier critiques some useful online tools to plan your meetings effectively: Tools for Share Agendas, Minutes and Scheduling.
| Course Content | Modules |
| The Basics | 1 |
| Planning | 2 |
| Preparing an Agenda | 3 |
| Problems and how to deal with them | 4 |
| Techniques for Resolving Conflict | 5 |
| Making Decisions | 6 |
Managing Meetings Training
CPD Units ‘2’
Course Assessment
Online assessment in managing meetings training is carried out by a series of multiple choice questions. Candidates must answer 70% of the questions correctly to pass each module. We advise you to complete each module and answer the question before moving on to the next module. This provides a better learning experience because you will need to have knowledge from earlier modules to understand some of the material in the later modules. For those who complete the course successfully, a PDF certificate of the award is sent directly to your inbox. Hard copies of the award are available on request. The course takes 60 minutes of training to complete. This is course content only and does not cover the time it takes to answer questions.