Companies use many types of meetings to carry out various operations. Understanding how to use different meetings can help you become a stronger leader as it can help you communicate with your team. This article will discuss the different types of meetings and give tips on how to run them.
The organization of business meetings
Work meetings are vital elements of running a company. Business meetings are a concept, the definition of which means the communication of people to find a solution to a particular problem. For the meeting of business people to be as helpful as possible, it is required to bring the participants to communicate and create a comfortable environment for cooperation and, of course, provide an opportunity to choose. There are meetings where you make decisions, exchange information, and there are those where you discuss something. Today, the organization of conferences is very popular. Meetings can help company leaders facilitate communication, discuss priorities, and announce significant company changes.
For companies with a collaborative policy, it’s common for them to involve customers, suppliers, and even business associates in their meetings. In general, each type of organizational meeting has its unique purpose. To achieve these goals, you consider the difference in the organization and conduct of a particular meeting. It explains why you must define the meeting type when scheduling the meeting.
The most common types of business meetings
Any business meeting is a process consisting of four phases: building a dialogue, orienting in every aspect, choice, and outcome. So, there are the following kinds of meetings:
- Status meetings
A status meeting usually includes a discussion of an ongoing project. This meeting can take place at different levels. For example, managers can get together and discuss their teams’ progress towards completing various project tasks. This meeting can also occur at the team level, as each member can report their progress to each other and their managers.
- Board meetings
Board meetings are the meetings of collegial bodies, where the board members discuss the most important topics related to the company’s strategy. As a rule, a board meeting is preceded by a lot of preparatory work: preparing the agenda of the meeting, informing the members of the collegial body and other interested parties, and preparing materials for consideration at the meeting following the agenda (as a rule, this is a statement on the issue or abstracts of the speech and a draft decision), their copying and distribution to all participants of the meeting for preliminary acquaintance, preparation of the premises for the meeting, etc.
- Team-building meetings
A team-building meeting is helpful if you want to strengthen bonds between team members who may not know each other very well. A team-building meeting can encourage team members to give positive feedback about others. Sometimes these meetings may aim to resolve disagreements between team members and thus improve their relationship. Team building meetings tend to be more focused and formal, so many companies can host team-building through fun activities.
- Project meetings
Of course, depending on their goals, the above typology of business meetings is not absolute and exhaustive. In practice, in most cases, several goals are set for the negotiators at once, making such a meeting more productive and saving time. Many enterprises have different departments, each assigned a specific task, such as developing a new product or reorganizing a business. Quite often, the organization’s leadership organizes meetings that bring together project managers of departments.