CollaborationNewsRemote meetings

The secret to preventing unnecessary meetings lies in the written word. It doesn’t matter if you have an office or video meeting, every time you plan for a meeting you need to sit down and write.

Write down the purpose of the meeting, write down the agenda, write down the planning, and write down per agenda item who is responsible and what you want to achieve.

Asynchronous  |  Written

After having sent the invite, the next step is to use asynchronous, written communication, like email, a chat tool, a shared document, or a professional meeting tool like Yabbu, to actively prepare the meeting together. Share relevant information upfront, in written form. Immediately start to discuss topics, in written form. Ask everybody to come up with their viewpoints, in written form. Finally, when you notice for agenda items that everybody is pretty much in agreement, conclude and make necessary decisions. Those agenda items are crossed off before the meeting. It simply means they were not worth the meeting in the first place, or that they weren’t ready to begin with.

Last resort

Meetings, whether physical or via video, should be a last resort. A refuge for items that are too tough to be entirely dealt with in writing. And of course for items where the social context is the most important driver in the first place. Take this approach and you’ll see that in general more than half of your agenda items won’t make it to your meeting. All thanks to the written word.

In our next blog, The Power of Written Meetings, we’ll explain why this approach saves you and your team up to 50% time on meetings. And if that’s not enough, we’ll substantiate another 4 mind-blowing benefits of written meetings. The reason why thousands of companies already put this into practice.

2 Comments

    • Thanks Emon!
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