With 2022 around the corner, now is the perfect time to take stock of what we've learned about meetings and what can make them awesome. What can you do to make your meetings soar? Here are 12 ideas: 1) Start and end your meetings on time 2) Include a purpose, goal,...
Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management books including Off the Clock and 168 Hours. In this Medium piece, she shares the question that she asks before calling a meeting: What crucial change will result from bringing people together, that could not...
Meetings - they are a part of life, but they don't need to be a way of life. In this interview, Eric Porres, Founder & CEO of MeetingScience, sits down (remotely) with Brad Berens, Editor in Chief of the IAB, to talk about what's changed to our meeting practices...
Those of us who present, facilitate, and teach for a living understand the importance of developing a personal connection with an audience. It’s critical to be and feel natural; to make people laugh, feel at ease, and fully engage — and perhaps even lose themselves —...
You join a video conference call. You’re one of nine faces on the screen. About 10 minutes into the call, your mind starts to wander and you realize you have no idea what the last person just said. You pretend to keep listening while also checking your inbox. By the...
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Pull up a chair and stay a while. You’ll be a better meeting practitioner as a result.
Develop rituals and have a disciplined way of managing the day. Schedule a start and an end time. Have a rhythm. Take a shower, get dressed, even if it’s not what you’d usually wear to work, then get started on the day’s activities. If you’re used to moving...
It’s realistic to assume that shifting to the ‘home office’ will become the new normal for many of us for a while, given Wednesday’s announcement by the World Health Organization that the coronavirus has officially reached ‘pandemic’ status. Some employees will be...
To be sure, meetings are essential for enabling collaboration, creativity, and innovation. They often foster relationships and ensure proper information exchange. They provide real benefits. But why would anyone argue in defense of excessive meetings, especially when...
Employees could be skittish about being personally scrutinized or fear that they’ll be individually targeted or blamed for productivity problems that they see as being out of their control. Acknowledge that not all productivity issues are the result of personal...
In your mission to use data as one of the tools for improving your meeting culture, you'll be collecting information that can show trends and patterns for your meetings, so you'll need a system where you can save and add to this data over time (in most companies, this...
Roman philosopher Seneca’s spectacular 2,000-year-old treatise On the Shortness of Life (public library) — a poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit yet so easily forget and so chronically fail to put into practice. Seneca writes: "It is not that we have a short...
Decisions are the lifeblood of organizations, and meetings are where important business decisions often happen. Yet many executives are nonplussed—at best—when describing their own experience of meetings. Some business leaders we know wonder openly how they can...
Do you know where your time goes in your business… or are you always scrambling to keep on top of things? Do you feel as though you have NO free time? All of that can change when you make strategic shifts in your business! One of the best ways to do this is to audit...
Meetings — effective meetings — are for communicating and decision-making. As leaders, we have to make sure the meetings in our company are lean, on-point, accurate and valuable. If not, we're wasting a massive amount of time, money and opportunity. Love 'em or hate...
We’ve all been stuck in a bad meeting. You arrive on time only to have the meeting start 10 minutes late. The agenda? Unclear. The person in charge? Also. Some people start to offer ideas, others shoot them down. Nothing is really decided and the meeting wraps up, as...