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Tips for Running an Effective Business Meeting

Tips for Running an Effective Business Meeting

As a female-owned business, you have the opportunity to run meetings from your unique perspective. However, you also need to make sure your team is following what you’re saying. Though most people are currently working from home due to the coronavirus outbreak, it’s still essential to have these pointers in your back pocket. Keep reading to learn some tips for running an effective business meeting.


Prepare ahead of time

In order to have a great and effective meeting, you must prepare. Go into a meeting knowing the exact purpose for the meeting, the main points you need to discuss, and why each individual is in that meeting. Sometimes, it's easy to invite every available person to the meeting when you really only need a few people. By ensuring you take the time to plan before the meeting, you’ll be much more comfortable leading the meeting.

Keep the meeting brief

Some companies avoid meetings at all costs, while others have a meeting for everything—including a meeting to prepare for the upcoming meeting. Regardless of your company’s preference, you should make sure you’re not wasting anyone’s time. One way to make the most of a meeting is by sending out an agenda to everyone invited. That will make sure everyone knows exactly what to expect. Additionally, if you think you need an hour, consider thirty minutes instead. Less time will force you to be efficient, and ask yourself, what’s absolutely necessary to include in the agenda?

Use a simple PowerPoint with visuals

A PowerPoint presentation is a handy tool. That said, your slides should be a tool to get your points across, not house all your information. An ideal PowerPoint slide will be clean and readable. You can develop excellent slides simply by following a few rules. First, use an easily readable font. Second, use succinct bullet points. Your audience shouldn’t be overwhelmed with information, so use as few words as possible. Lastly, use visuals, whether that’s a graphic, video, photos, or anything else to break up the text. Don’t waste too much time trying to develop the best graphics; visuals are simply there to aid your meeting and keep your audience engaged.

Offer handouts

There’s some debate about whether handouts are worthwhile or not. Here’s what we’d recommend: don’t use handouts during your meeting, because there’s a good chance your audience won’t pay attention to anything other than the paper in their hand. Additionally, if you’re using a PowerPoint during your meeting, providing a handout will only confuse your audience further because they won’t

know which to pay attention to. So, instead, we’d recommend offering a handout for the attendees on their way out that summarizes your main points. Many individuals still want something tangible, so giving them a handout may make your ideas and main points stick better.

Just when you thought you could get away from paper in the office, you can’t. Handouts are an effective way of showing that you mean business, and many people still want hard copies of documents. That said, your business should still have an office printer for handouts and more.