In the previous post around Effective Meetings in Workspace , I talk about some general best practice about a productive meeting. Normally a meeting can be organised based on following phrases. In this page, I am going to write down some practical tips for facilitating a productive workshop.

  1. Before meeting kick-off
  2. In the meeting
  3. Post meeting follow-up

Before Kick-Off

  1. Preparation.
    • Get to the meeting room if you have.
    • Get yourself a cup of water if you need.
    • Get your meeting materials in hand, or show up in your screen.
    • Switch to the topic context that this meeting is going to discuss.
  2. Join the meeting on time.
  3. Attendee.
    • Wait for 1 minute to allow everybody join the meeting, and settle down.
  4. Opening.
    • Talk about who you are, what you will do during the meeting.
    • Introduce everyone about their name and role if necessary.
    • Talk about the Meeting Objective of this meeting.
      • why we want to have this meeting.
      • what we want to achieve out of this session.
  5. House Keeping.
    • Keep camera on if necessary.
    • Raise hand to speak up if necessary.
    • etc..
  6. Meeting timeline. Brief talk about the overall meeting timeline to everyone.
  7. Raise any questions before kicking off the content part.

In the Meeting

  1. Time-boxing. If there are lots topics that need to go through during the session, try to time-box each topic with limited time.
  2. Meeting Note . It would be awesome if you have extra capacity to note down discussion points and prepare meeting note during the meeting. If not, simply find an teammate to help you on that.
  3. Ask clarify questions. If it’s an alignment session, simply don’t keep assumption and try to be as crystal clear as possible.

Post Follow-up

  1. Send out meeting note as quick as you can to retain memory freshness of attendees.
  2. Write clear follow-up actions that contains clear action owner and expected timeline.

Summary

Hope it helps.