Meeting self reflection

The work environment is really something interesting and at the same time it makes our life so busy. We always want to make ourselves professional and experts in our field of career. Every day we learn something that adds a value to our knowledge and gives us strength to manage our profession more effectively.

I have involved in several meetings since I started working long time ago, and in most of these meetings I was as a member and in some others I was the leader as well. However; some of these meetings had no proper plan, objectives or a clear purpose and on the other hand the rest might be more efficient in term of planning and the objectives.

During this course I found that by observing a few simple rules before conducting any meeting will help to make the meeting more effective, fruitful and meet its purpose and the objective. The following is essential to success the meeting

1. The leader has to Identify the start and the end time of the meeting so that participants know when the meeting will start and end as they are busy in many other tasks in their daily work and need to organize their time as well.
2. Creating an agenda and circulating among the attendees is one of the most important things to be done  by the leader so that the attendees should know the flow and the sequence of the meeting discussion and they would prepare themselves for a discussion and for the reflection of any opinions.
3. The leader has to State clearly the objective and the purpose to contribute to the desired outcomes so that the participants can work together to achieve it
4. The leader must Review the minutes and action items.  This rule is very important in order to document all the action items so that the outcomes can be measured and the objective will be met
5. The leader has to clarify the action items so that all involved attendees know what should they do after the meeting and what are the expected results from them.
6. At the end the leader has to determine the next meeting date with the attendees in order to discuss all the achievements so far and to decide what the next steps are.

I believe by following these steps the quality of meetings will be improved and at the same time we will make our time more productive and objectives will be met.