Efficient meetings for SMEs in 9 steps

As an SME, you and your team ensure that daily operations run smoothly. This brings a number of challenges and bottlenecks that are typical for small and medium-sized businesses. Take meetings for exemple. Often they don't turn out to be as useful as it as to be and the participants feel frustrated afterwards. With this 9-step plan, meetings do what they have to do: deliver useful and concrete action points for you and your employees. Efficient meetings bring you one step closer to operational excellence. Let's go! Stap 1: to meet of not to meet? Avoid useless meetings. Ask yourself if a meeting is necessary, because sometimes a short conversation with one colleague is enough to solve your problem. Stap 2: goal! Set a clear goal in advance: what do we want to achieve at the end of the meeting? Stap 3: collect discussions points Each participant provides the organizer with the themes he or she wants to discuss in advance. Stap 4: preparation = time saiving Take some time to prepare the meeting. List the agenda items and determine the duration for each theme. Stap 5: spread the agenda Send the agenda to all participants before the meeting, so that everyone knows the purpose of the meeting. Stap 6: right on time Nothing worse than meetings that don't start on time. Make sure the meeting starts according to the agreement. Stap 7: timekeeper is key Indicate a timekeeper to monitor the time per theme. This way you avoid endless conversations Stap 8: complete and ... action! Conclude each theme with a conclusion and some concrete action points. Assign immediately each action point to one of those present. Set a concrete deadline. Stap 9: follow up Start the next meeting with a small review of the outstanding actions from the previous meetings. Are deadlines exceeded? Talk to the responsible person about it. Yes but … Would you like to work like this in the future? But do you fear that it is impossible to introduce this way of working to your SME? Then we have good news. The handy management tool too-doo ensures, among other things, that you follow the 9-step plan easily at every meeting. For example, you digitally assign the agreed action points to employees during the meeting. Everyone follows his or her action points and deadlines via a personal dashboard. .