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Successful Meetings in High Performing Organisations — Part 3: After the meeting
This is the third of a series of articles about Successful Meetings in High Performing Organisations.
In the first article, we have covered that a successful meeting starts with good preparation.
In the second article, I wrote about how to conduct and participate in a meeting achieving the desired goal successfully.
In this part, I am going to cover what should happen just after the meeting ends.
A successful meeting is defined as the one where the meeting goal is achieved. Targeting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) is a possible way to make output and outcomes more probable.
After meeting expectations
Whether your company is mastering the successful meeting practices presented in these series or it is still finding the way, at the end of each meeting the audience would expect:
- Communication with the notes taken during the meeting or a link to equivalent accessible content.
- Clearly stated actions and next steps with a responsible and a due date for each action.
Agreed actions
The agreed action can be a decision, a change in process, someone to contact or involve, a follow up, a new meeting, a document to write/edit. Ending the meeting without any action or deciding that another meeting is needed is not a good sign of success. But not all the meetings that end agreeing on a new meeting are a failure if a goal is achieved as well. For instance a bigger or wider initiative can be divided into smaller goals so that each meeting has its own SMART goal.
On the other hand, not everything needs a meeting. Many cooperative activities can be completed asynchronously. Perhaps with a little more effort agreeing on working in the background could be better than just scheduling a new session.
Many tools allow people to work on the same document at the same time in parallel without the need to be in a call. Even without specific tools, it is possible to be creative and efficient. If you don’t have specific tools to draw or make diagrams, you can use…
