Workplace Meeting

2306 Words5 Pages

Within a workplace, there are times when the easiest and most effective form of communication is to bring all employees involved together into the same room. This idea is a popular form of communication that is most commonly known as the meeting. The idea of meetings stretches across all industries and cultures, and has the potential to be extremely effective. The trouble is though, workplace meetings do not always meet their potential and are not as effective as they could be. A manager’s ability to lead an efficient and effective meeting is a very important skill to have within the realm of communication. In order to try and find out what it takes to run an effective meeting, several sources written by academics will be summarized and examined. To begin with, summaries of all the sources will be given, in order to gain a grasp on the general knowledge of meetings within the literature. Following that, it will be looked at what the different authors agree on and disagree on. Finally, the information from all the articles will be brought together in order to give a conclusion on what managers need to do in order to run meetings effectively. With many top managers saying that 60-80% of their day goes into meetings (Bang et al, 2010), it is integral that managers have knowledge of how to properly organize and facilitate meetings in the workplace.

The first article that will be looked at is written by Bang et al (2010), and is titled Effectiveness in top management group meetings: The role of goal clarity, focused communication, and learning behaviour. Within the article, the authors look at the idea of having a clear goal for meetings. There were three thesis’ made, but the first is most relevant, which states that there is a cor...

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...t managers could use to increase their skills in meeting management without much additional work. The first is to make sure there is a clear goal and agenda that everyone in the meeting is aware of. The second is to have a facilitator that can help keep the discussion on track and close to the agenda. Third is to stop the meeting once the goal is achieved and not drag it out. Finally, everyone should leave the meeting knowing what was accomplished and what the next step is. The literature suggests dozens of different ideas and thoughts into increasing effectiveness, but these four are the most basic and easiest to implement. With unproductive meetings costing $60 billion in the United States every year (Bang et al, 2010), the literature surrounding meeting effectiveness is very important, and gives insight into a business practice that has yet to be optimized.

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