Office meetings are costly. The associated cost of office meetings have to be evaluated to gauge whether the weekly or monthly meetings are detrimental to the bottom line of the business, and whether you are having them too frequently. Having employees sitting around a desk because they have to be present is costly. Should the time spend listening to ideas be spent by every single employee in the business? Shouldn’t productivity be measured, and projects evaluated before having office meetings with everyone? Before scheduling an office meeting, is there an agenda associated with this meeting, or is it on the spur of the moment meeting?
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Tired of Useless Meetings? 9 Ways to Make Them More Effective. (Infographic)
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Meetings. What a drag they can be. They go longer than they’re supposed to. Someone blabs out of turn or off topic. Your mind drifts to tasks you could be checking off instead of sitting there, stuck. Then come the action items and, tag, you’re it. Your to-do list just got longer.
Sound familiar? Sure does to us. But, believe it or not, not all meetings are total timesucks and not all meetings are boring. Some run like clockwork. With an attendee nip here and an agenda tuck there, they can be much more efficient, productive and, if you’re lucky, even a little fun.
From holding walk-and-talks outside in the fresh air, to scheduling start times like a Swiss train conductor (we kid you not), here are nine clever ways to have more effective meetings, care of the meeting makers at CT Business Travel. Bonus: Not one mention of Robert’s Rules of Order, we promise.
5 Reasons In-Person Meetings Still Matter
Being in the event planning industry, salespeople are constantly trying to sell me the newest virtual technologies to make events more easily accessible from a wider audience.
One memorable experience I will always remember is when a salesman came into my office to pitch his virtual event product and at the end of the meeting I asked, “If this product is so great, why are you sitting here in person?” After a few moments of silence, he said, “It’s more effective to sell in-person than through a computer.”
Meeting over.
According to a recent Meeting Professional International survey, virtual attendance is projected to grow at twice the rate of live attendance. This rise is the biggest change in how meetings are run since the introduction of PowerPoint.
However, while I believe that virtual meetings can be useful in certain circumstances (when time is short or distance is too far), there are many reasons why in-person events are more effective for businesses, large and small.
3 Growth Challenges Facing Small Businesses Right Now
Hiring is simultaneously one of the biggest opportunities and one of the biggest challenges small businesses have. Expanding your staff is necessary for taking your company to the next level of growth, and the right hire can help your sales skyrocket. On the other hand, it can be incredibly difficult to find the perfect candidate, and if that person turns out to be the wrong choice, it can cost a lot of time and money to replace him or her.
Based on recently released studies and reports, here’s what you need to know about the current state of small business hiring and growth, and what challenges business owners are dealing with.
Seventy percent of small businesses experience problems during the hiring process.
Small businesses were responsible for nearly half of all new U.S. jobs in 2015, and yet the vast majority said that the hiring process takes longer and is more difficult than they expect, found an ADP survey. ADP polled more than 1,000 owners and managers of companies that had fewer than 50 employees, finding that the biggest specific challenges were longer hiring cycles (34 percent), a loss of productivity (28 percent) and new employees not meeting expectations (25 percent).
