Course Outcomes
This meeting planning and design course will:
- Suggest criteria for determining if a meeting is the most efficient and effective vehicle for achieving a goal.
- Share best practices for handling background material and perfunctory information outside of meeting time.
- Offer ideas for making pre-work completion easier.
- Provide participants with a template for prioritizing topics, determining decisions and deliverables, and capturing notes and future commitments.
- Recommend best practices for calendaring.
Course Overview
While well-designed meetings can increase collaboration and engagement, a poorly structured session puts an unnecessary burden on those attending. Unclear agendas, underprepared participants, and unproductive discussion demotivate, deflate, and move people toward disengagement. This course focuses on best practices for avoiding those problems by planning more effective and efficient meetings.
Program Objectives
- Identify the benefits and drawbacks of meeting in person.
- Define the purpose of a meeting and outline its goal in a short sentence.
- Determine whether a meeting is the best vehicle for achieving the goal.
- Identify meeting content, outcomes, and pre-work.
- Create a meaningful agenda.
- Invite people purposefully.
- Think before saying “yes” to a meeting.
- Get the most from Outlook’s meeting scheduling function.
Program Modules
- Two Sides: The Benefits and Drawbacks of Meeting
- The Question: To Meet or Not to Meet?
- Planet Reality: What Reasonable People Can Accomplish
- The Right People: Who to Include
- Before You Say Yes: What to Ask
- Rinse and Repeat: Outlook Hacks
By the conclusion of this session, participants should have tools they can use to make better use of people’s time by designing more effective and efficient meetings.
