What is a business meeting?
Today, businesses must negotiate with a variety of different individuals and groups in order to be successful. These negotiations may take place with customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, or government officials. Each negotiation presents unique challenges and opportunities.
Business meetings are an opportunity for management to convey the main goals and objectives to all departments at once, get feedback and, based on the data obtained, adjust the action plan for the company. Businesses that are able to successfully negotiate win greater profits, improved relationships, and a competitive edge.
A few years ago, such meetings were held only in person, but with the growth of information technology companies can hold business meetings remotely via video conferencing.
Types of Business Meetings
Team building meetings
Team building is a meeting aimed at improving teamwork. Such meetings are a critical component in creating a strong company culture that leads to increased productivity. For big companies with multiple offices, team building can be a great opportunity for colleagues to get to know each other better.
Innovation meetings
The idea of innovation meetings is based on promoting new business ideas by sharing information between participants. Innovation meetings often begin with out-of-the-box thinking, brainstorming, connecting and sharing ideas on a large scale. For instance, if you want to develop a poster maker tool, you can hold a meeting with software developers to exchange ideas. If you are running an e-commerce development company, you are going to have to hold many meetings to keep things running smoothly.
Information sharing meetings
This type of meeting usually involves educational courses, training or webinars. At information sharing meetings, attendees have historically been passive listeners, but with a wide range of collaboration tools, such as interactive polls, voting, and chat, there is an opportunity for active participation.
Status update meetings
Status update meetings are regular project meetings where team members agree on their progress toward a common goal, reporting on current updates, task progress, challenges, and next steps. These meetings are particularly important in the construction industry with tight timelines and complex workflows, where keeping track of project milestones and ensuring timely delivery is critical to success. Therefore, it is important to organize status update meetings and use construction scheduling software to understand how the build is progressing. Group activities in such meetings usually include problem-solving, decision-making, prioritizing, and assigning tasks. It is useful to use reports, graphs, and goal setting worksheets to keep the team updated.
Decision-making meetings
In a decision-making meeting, a group of people come together to make a decision. For instance, if you want to change your business model from eCommerce to B2B2C eCommerce, you might need to hold a decision-making meeting to exchange ideas and understand whether it is a good idea or not. The group may use a variety of methods to make the decision, including voting, consensus, or a majority vote. In a majority vote meeting, the group votes on a proposal and the proposal is accepted if it receives more than half of the votes.
Problem-solving meetings
These are the most common type of business meeting. A problem-solving meeting is a meeting in which a group of people come together to brainstorm and come up with a solution to a problem.
This type of meeting is often used in workplaces, when a team needs to come up with a way to solve a specific issue. In order to generate the most productive ideas, it’s important to encourage all participants to share their thoughts, and to avoid judging or criticizing any suggestions.
The goal of a problem-solving meeting is to come up with a solution that everyone can agree on. Once a solution is reached, it’s important to put a plan in place to make sure that the solution is actually implemented. This type of meeting is especially important in HR for small businesses, as the solutions reached can have a significant impact on the organization and its employees. Once a solution is reached, it’s crucial to put a plan in place to make sure that the solution is actually implemented, and the problem is fully resolved.
How does the online meeting run?
The online meeting will run according to the agenda that has been created. Each participant will be given the opportunity to speak and share their ideas. The meeting will be moderated by the meeting organizer, who will ensure that the meeting runs smoothly and on schedule.
- The person in charge of organizing the meeting sends a link to the virtual room to his or her colleagues.
- At the appointed time, participants click on the link. They activate a webcam and microphone so they can see and hear each other as they speak and exchange ideas.
However, the meeting via the Internet is not limited to communication only. There are other features available as well:
- Slideshow. Employees can use slides on different topics and share them with colleagues.
- Screen sharing. When one participant starts screen sharing, the others can view the desktop content.
- Instant messaging. Participants can share text messages, files, impressive images, and videos.
- Polling. A quick way to vote on a particular issue and make a final decision. For instance, you can ask your team whether it is a good idea to try outsourcing digital services or if it is worth to use certain software at a workplace.
- Meeting recording. If any participants miss a meeting or parts of a meeting, they can review the recording of the meeting later.
Business Meeting Icebreakers
Icebreakers are a great way to create understanding in a remote environment and foster relationships, collaboration and inclusivity in your distributed team. This can help meeting attendees feel more comfortable and get them to open up during the meeting. A business meeting moderator can ask people questions to get to know them or ask fun questions to create a more comfortable environment overall.
Using icebreakers in remote meetings is a must if a head of a company wants to build rapport with a distributed team. But what do those icebreakers look like in action?
Some examples of icebreakers questions:
- What’s your favorite snack / food?
- What’s your spirit animal?
- What’s your favorite part of your job — and why?
- What’s your favorite hobby?
- Share a unique fact from childhood
Building rapport is always important, but it’s especially important when managing a remote or distributed team.
How to organize a business meeting
1. Choose a video conferencing solution
When running online business meetings, it’s important to choose the right video conferencing solution to meet your company’s needs. TrueConf is a video conferencing solution that can take your virtual business meeting to a new level.
TrueConf offers extremely useful features for your business meetings:
- Ease of use. The solution interface is extremely user-friendly and intuitive.
- Unified communications. TrueConf provides all types of communication required for your team, including video conferencing, instant messaging, address book, presence statuses, VoIP integration and much more.
- Collaboration tools. During video conferencing users can enjoy multiple collaboration tools, such as remote desktop control, slideshow, screen sharing and recording.
- Data security. All sensitive data is stored locally, making TrueConf completely secure, which is especially important in the business industry.
- Technical support. TrueConf offers its customers exclusive high-quality technical support that will promptly solve any problems with the video conferencing system and answer any additional questions.
2. Plan business meetings
Schedule a meeting, prepare topics, send materials and make sure all participants are informed of the event time and agenda.
3. Lock your meetings
Think in advance about the list of participants that are needed at the business meeting. Make sure that unauthorized users will not be able to connect to your conference.
4. Set time limits
Each topic should be allotted a certain amount of time so that your meeting does not drag on any longer than you planned.
5. Assign a moderator
An authoritative person on the team should correct the discussion vector and make sure time limitations are met.
6. Summarize the results
Allocate tasks among employees and set deadlines for their completion.
How to conclude a business meeting
When finishing a business meeting, it’s very important to get feedback from employees. Some of them may have additional questions, some may want to suggest alternative solutions to a business problem.
Meeting managers can also send participants additional materials or a video meeting recording so that the agenda can be viewed at any time.
At the very end of the meeting, thank participants for their time and attention. This will help build positive relationships by showing your team members that you appreciate and respect them and their time.
Of course, online meetings cannot completely replace face-to-face meetings. However, they are especially relevant for companies with several branches or representative offices. After all, employees can discuss current tasks and problems without leaving the office. This greatly saves employees’ time and reduces the company’s costs.
The key to the success of an online meeting is thorough preparation, strict adherence to the rules, and a quality video meeting platform. Follow the right tips for your company and hold successful business meetings!
