What’s the best way to prepare for a meeting? By planning it and making sure that all bases are covered so that you know it’ll go smoothly beforehand. Show
In preparation for the meeting, you’ll need to get your slides and talking points ready – but there are other things to do, too. You’ll also need a clear structure and your team will need to be ready. Let us walk you step-by-step through the meeting preparation process that works for us at Slido and share some of the best practices that were game-changing for us. 1. Set purpose and goalsFirst, define the meeting purpose, or the ‘Why’ behind your meeting. Why are you meeting? Is it to brainstorm? Is it to have a discussion or plan the next steps? If you set one clear objective, it’ll be much easier for you to design an agenda for your meeting. Second, specify the main goal, or the ‘What’ of the meeting. What should come out of the meeting? What is the main deliverable? Set a tangible meeting outcome and stick to it. If it’s to make a decision about X, don’t leave the meeting without seeing it through. These will be the guideposts that will help you set the right expectations and steer the meeting in the right direction. 2. Create & share an agendaNow that you’ve set your meeting objectives and goals, it’s time to create a bulletproof agenda. A meeting agenda is an outline of all the activities and discussion points to cover during a meeting in order to reach the meeting goal/s. In short, a structure that your meeting will follow. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all meeting agenda template, there are several best practices to keep in mind when designing an agenda for a) recurring and b) one-time/first-time meetings. Recurring meetingsWith meetings that you run regularly – e.g. team syncs – it is tempting to think there’s no need for an agenda. Your colleagues already know the format, so what’s there to design? Well, there are still things to consider. The main keyword here is simplicity. A simple agenda goes a long way and will hold your meeting together like a skeleton. All you need is a list of action points to go through. Write down the main discussion points that you want to touch on during the meeting. You can even assign owners that will drive the discussion around each point. Here’s an example from one of our meetings: Our colleague Nadia shares the main discussion points before the meeting in our team’s Slack channel.💡 Don’t forget to share the agenda with your team members ahead of the meeting (1-3 days) via your internal comms channels, such as Slack, Webex, or Microsoft Teams. One-time meetings/First-time meetingsWith new meetings for which you don’t have an already established format, you need to go deeper. In these instances, you need to design the whole meeting agenda from scratch. The main keyword here is alignment. Given that your team members don’t know the format, it’s crucial to:
If there are multiple speakers who will present at the meeting, align with them prior to the meeting. Set a time frame for each of the meeting sections. Be as specific as possible. Get inspired by our first-ever ‘Cross-team alignment’ meeting, for which we set a very bold objective — to bring together 3 teams (20+ people) and get them aligned. Our colleague Sabine shares the detailed meeting agenda in our team’s Slack channel. She included links to the slide deck and to the Q&A to allow people to ask questions prior to the meeting.A lot also depends on the size of the meeting. If you’re preparing an all-company meeting, there’s a whole different strategy to employ. Read more about how to design an all-hands meeting agenda here. 3. Send out meeting invitesSend meeting invites to everyone involved in the meeting at least two weeks in advance so your colleagues have enough time to work it into their schedules. Add all the important details in the meeting invite description. Share the meeting goals and the agenda (regardless of whether you already shared it or plan to share it later – make it available in the invite as well). In case you’re meeting online or in a hybrid setup, also include the link to the video conference call so that nobody can miss it, and can easily access it via their calendars. Here’s an example of a meeting invite for our summer brainstorming session: An example of a meeting invite that we circulated before our summer brainstorming session. In the invite, we shared the meeting agenda, the meeting goals, the Webex link to the video conference where the meeting took place, and a link to Slido where we collected people’s ideas.💡 For even better invites, add links to Slido so you can start collecting people’s input, like questions or ideas before the meeting. Learn more in the next point. 4. Collect questions and ideas from your teamGathering input from the team members before the meeting works well with some meeting formats. Brainstorming & planningFor example, if you’re having a brainstorming session or a planning meeting, start collecting your team members’ ideas beforehand. Attach a link to Slido to the meeting agenda or to the meeting invite and ask your colleagues to type their ideas into the app. This gives your colleagues a safe space for submitting their ideas and levels the playing field – everyone can contribute equally, even the ones that fear speaking up in the meeting. They can even do so anonymously if they wish. Plus, it’s more efficient than brainstorming during the meeting. It allows you to review all the submissions before the meeting and then spend the meeting time discussing and prioritizing. In preparation for our meetings at Slido we use this technique a lot: Before our brainstorming session, our team lead Juraj invites us to post our ideas into Slido in our team’s Slack channel.Retrospective meetingsA team retrospective is another meeting type where you can benefit greatly from collecting insights beforehand. Send a stop-start-continue survey for your participants to fill out in advance. An example of a ‘stop-start-continue’ retrospective survey created in Slido.Go through people’s submissions and look for patterns, items mentioned repeatedly, or any other important feedback. This way, you can identify the most burning issues which you can then use to create an agenda, and drive discussions during the meeting. Create your own poll or survey in Slido and hear from everyone. Sign up for free All company meetings/All team meetingsLarger meetings such as all-hands, town halls, or strategic team meetings provide an opportunity to address questions or concerns that your team members might have. Give your team a chance to post their questions into Slido even before the meeting. You can then address them during the meeting – either in a dedicated Q&A session, or address them continuously throughout. We start collecting questions from our employees about a week before every company all-hands meeting. Our Head of Internal Communications, Silvi, shares a link to Slido’s Q&A to collect questions before our monthly all-hands meeting. She usually shares the link with us a week before the meeting.This way, our executive team has time to prepare their answers and our colleagues have a chance to go through the submitted questions and upvote the ones they identify with. We also give our colleagues a chance to ask anonymously which means our leadership gets more honest questions. Read also: How to Host More Effective Meetings by Collecting Input in Advance 5. Distribute supporting materialsIf there’s material that you want your meeting participants to review before the meeting, or if there’s something that you want your team to prepare, communicate it well in advance. You may, for instance, add it as an attachment to your meeting invite or share it in your internal comms channel. It’s good for getting everyone aligned and familiar with the forthcoming discussion. However, it’s good practice to clarify expectations and make a clear distinction between what’s a must and what’s nice to have. Perhaps not everyone needs to read through a 50-slides-long presentation. Sometimes, it’s enough to get a gist of what will be discussed. 6. Prepare your slidesGetting the slide deck ready is a drill you surely know very well, but here are a few tips that can make your life a little easier.
7. Create opportunities for interactionWhen designing a meeting, create multiple ‘interaction points’ – the spots on the agenda where you purposefully create a space for your meeting participants to actively contribute. This is important for creating meaningful engagement throughout your meeting. If you let your participants sit passively through the meeting, you will eventually lose their attention. If, on the other hand, you give them space to be actively involved in the meeting, you will engage them. So, how do you create these interaction points? Go through your meeting agenda and think about at which point it would make sense to hear from your participants. For example, after you’ve brainstormed some ideas for projects, ask your teammates: “Which of these projects do you think we should prioritize in the next quarter?” Turn it into an interactive poll. Add your project ideas as options in a multiple choice or a ranking poll and let your teammates vote. Slido ranking poll is a great tool for better prioritization in teams. Just put all items as poll options and ask your team members to rank them according to their preference.It’s a way to make your meetings more democratic – you’ll give everyone a voice – and engaging – you’ll involve everyone in co-creating the meeting and influencing its outcomes. Learn more about how to create interaction spots in your presentation here. 💡 You can add a Slido poll, quiz, or Q&A directly into your slide deck with Slido’s integration with PowerPoint and Google Slides – it will be added as a separate interactive slide. You can manage every interaction as you click through the slides. 8. Prepare the openingHow you kick off the meeting may lay the foundations for the rest of the meeting, so leave nothing to chance and make sure to prepare your opening well. Welcome everyone; if your meeting includes remote participants, give them a special greeting to make them feel included from the start. To loosen people up, prepare a little icebreaker, or, if you need a quick interactive activity that will get people talking, fire up a fun poll question. For example, check the mood in the room and ask your colleagues how they feel in a word cloud poll. You can even let them express their feelings in emojis. In the Slido word cloud poll, your team members can also post emojis instead of words. It makes for quite a cool “emoji cloud”, don’t you think?Use the poll results to trigger a small chit-chat at the start – it’s good to start the meeting with a bit of socializing. Once you kick off the official part, provide a quick context for why you’re meeting up today and briefly run people through the agenda once again. 9. Set up the meetingLastly, make sure you have the meeting room arrangements figured out – whether you’re meeting in an actual room or in a virtual one. Meeting room: Face-to-face meeting
Meeting room: Hybrid meeting
Online room: Fully remote meeting
Ready to kick off your meeting?The quality of pre-meeting preparation can make or break your meeting. You can never be over-prepared. But fail to prepare at your own peril. With the tips that we’ve shared above, you will be 9 steps closer to a stellar meeting. We wish you good luck. And in the meantime, go ahead and try Slido for free. Start by adding one or two polls to your meeting presentation to keep your team members actively engaged. You can always add more later. Here’s to better meetings! 🥂 Try Slido at your meeting What is the goal of an informative speech?The purpose of the informative speech is to provide interesting, useful, and unique information to your audience. By dedicating yourself to the goals of providing information and appealing to your audience, you can take a positive step toward succeeding in your efforts as an informative speaker.
Why should we clarify our goal in writing informative speech?A good informative speech conveys accurate information to the audience in a way that is clear and that keeps the listener interested in the topic. Achieving all three of these goals—accuracy, clarity, and interest—is the key to your effectiveness as a speaker.
What are the 4 goals of an informative speech?Whether you are giving a speech to explain, describe, or demonstrate, you should consider the following five goals: be accurate, objective, clear, meaningful, and memorable.
How will you ensure your informative speech is accurate clear and will gain the audience's attention?Strategies to make information clear and interesting to an audience include adjusting the complexity of your information to the audience, avoiding jargon, creating concrete images, limiting information only to what is most relevant, linking information to what the audience already knows, and making information ...
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