The new year is a time when we set goals for ourselves to help us look better, feel better, and be more successful. If you are involved with a business or nonprofit, the start of 2018 is the perfect time to rethink the way your organization conducts meetings. In today’s new year blog post, we’d like to share with you some ideas that can make your group or company meetings better and more productive in 2018.
If you don’t do so already, distributing an agenda before your meeting will help to make the best use of everyone’s time and ensure that meetings don’t veer off topic. When sending out email or calendar invitations to your meeting invitees, include an agenda of 5-10 talking points. This will allow everyone involved to plan ahead and prepare any pertinent notes, work, or thoughts they may have on the topics.
While board meetings are traditionally held seated around a conference table, stand-up meetings between board members and staff have become more prevalent in recent years—and for good reason. According to the findings of this 1999 study by Allen Bluedorn and his colleagues, sit-down meetings not only take up to 34% longer than those where participants are standing up, their outcomes are not shown to be any more productive.
Video conferencing is a convenient way for people anywhere in the world to connect. Once a month, rather than drag staff away from their work stations to physically convene, set up an quick video conference with your team to catch everyone upon new, relevant developments. This is a great opportunity for everyone to check-in, share what they're working on, and express any ideas, concerns, or questions they may have with the group.
Holding in-person meetings on a regular basis can help increase communication, collaboration, and productivity within your organization— however, you can't always have everyone present for each meeting. In these cases, video conferencing enables participants who are not able to physically attend a meeting to join remotely over the internet to take part in discussions. This way, you don’t have to cancel or postpone a meeting just because one of the invitees is out of the office!
Whether you hold annual board meetings or weekly staff pow-wows, the ability to easily have multiple parties connect to your meeting over the phone or the internet—for FREE—is never a bad thing to have. Since 2000, FreeConference.com has been helping individuals, business owners, and nonprofit staff hold virtual meetings at little to no cost. If you haven't done so already, why not take advantage of free telephone and web conference calling in 2018? Get started today with just your name, email, and password!
Create your FreeConference.com account and get access to everything you need for your business or organization to hit the ground running, like video and Screen Sharing, Call Scheduling, Automated Email Invitations, Reminders, and more.
