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How to Create a Practical Crisis Management Plan [+ Templates]
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Are your weekly meetings becoming a mundane routine, leaving you and your team feeling unproductive and uninspired?
Are you tired of sitting through lengthy discussions that seem to go nowhere, wasting precious time and resources? Then it’s time to beef up your weekly meeting structure.
Meetings are designed to make decision-making and collaboration easier.
However, meetings that don't serve their goals result in employee disengagement and dissatisfaction. In fact, a survey showed that 95% of meeting attendees lose focus and miss parts of the meeting, while 39% doze off at meetings.
In this guide, we will provide you with practical strategies to structure your weekly meetings in a way that ensures optimal productivity and meaningful outcomes.
Conducting weekly meetings has the following benefits:
Weekly meetings can help keep employees accountable and efficient. Since they know there would be some form of status reporting or check-in with their progress in a week, they’ll avoid procrastinating on important and urgent tasks.
Weekly meetings provide an opportunity to share ideas, align goals and address roadblocks collectively. This ultimately strengthens teamwork and enhances a sense of camaraderie within the organization.
Weekly Meetings can be used to track the organization's progress along its previously established strategy for success or improvement.
We've all heard some version of the saying "Do not hold a meeting for an issue that could be resolved with an email."
For the most part, this rule should be followed.
However, sending emails could also be very inefficient for certain types of communication due to the often long response wait time and the tediousness of typing out texts.
For instance, brainstorming sessions are better held in a face-to-face meeting (physical or virtual) than weaving a lengthy email thread.
Weekly meetings create a transparent working environment within an organization and allow everyone involved to be aware of their peers' priorities. This also promotes better collaboration within the organization.
You should take note of the following while structuring your meetings:
To set up a productive meeting, you first need to decide who needs to be present in the meeting. This can help eliminate scheduling conflicts. You can send early notices and reminders to those who need to attend the meeting.
Also, determining who will be in a meeting can help in deciding the matters of discussion in the meeting. For instance, if no one from the sales team attends the meeting, there is no point in deliberating on sales improvement tactics.
The next thing you need to do is decide where the meeting should be held.
Depending on the nature of your organization, the location could be physical (like a conference room) or a virtual web conferencing tool (like Zoom) if you have some remote employees.
Use a platform that most of your team members are familiar with. You could also design a micro-learning program to help your attendees get acquainted with the chosen meeting platform.
This information helps attendees plan their schedules ahead of time. If you work with a remote team living in different time zones, you will have to ask them what the most convenient time would be.
You also need to determine how long the meeting will last. This would help you plan the agenda accordingly.
Now you have to determine the content of the meeting. This means planning the agenda of the meeting before the day of the meeting. This is specifically important because this helps guide the meeting and ensure time is not wasted on irrelevant subject matters.
After every meeting, you should have planned out post-meeting routines to ensure the effectiveness of your meetings. This process could include interviewing individual employees to ask for their feedback on the meeting and their suggestions on how future meetings could be improved.
Another follow-up routine is sending out the meeting minutes to everyone, including those who missed the meeting, to keep everyone informed on what was discussed.
Below are a few tips to employ to ensure your meetings are productive going forward
Organize the meeting agenda in order of priority. This will help you avoid a situation where there is limited time to tackle the most pressing issues. So get the most important tasks out of the way first.
Lengthy meetings can be tiring. Plus, members may not be motivated to show up for future meetings if they feel like their time is not valued or respected.
Try to schedule your weekly meeting at the same time and place (or platform). It is easier to show up for a meeting you remember having at the same time and place every week.
Consistency would help build a habit in your team members and keep them committed to attending the meetings.
Encourage the engagement of your team members. Many weekly team meetings and strategy planning meetings receive a bad name because only a few people do all of the talking. Everyone else is on mute, wondering why they had to be there.
Hence, make it a duty to seek out everyone’s opinion on discussed matters. This builds team spirit and ultimately increases productivity.
Recognize and reward the consistency and participation of members. A little shout-out and/or a round of applause can go a long way. This would incentivize team members to stay committed to showing up and participating in future meetings.
Send out the meeting agenda before the meeting and request feedback and suggestions on it. This gets the team thinking before the meeting. Visme collaboration features provide the tools to make this process very easy and intuitive.
Assign someone before the start of the meeting to record meeting notes, track agreed-upon action steps, note delegated responsibilities and prepare the meeting minutes if need be.
Or better yet, use our infinite whiteboard tools that allow everyone to leave their ideas on the whiteboard without interrupting the meeting.
No one likes a long, boring meeting. So any issue that can be thrashed out efficiently via other channels like Slack, email, or the company discord server should be handled through those channels and left off the meeting agenda.
Visme has a wide range of features and templates that will make your weekly meetings more engaging and impactful. Here is what one of our users has to say:
“Creating and sharing visually appealing content is quick and easy with Visme. I often find myself jumping into Visme during a meeting and finding an infographic or two to share stats and data. The response I receive about the data and presentation stylings are always positive and people want to learn more about Visme - which I'm glad to do.”
Paul | Sustainable Travel Services Coordinator
Here are some templates that’ll help you host better weekly meetings. You can customize them right away using our foolproof drag-and-drop editor.
This template offers a structured and visually engaging way to conduct retrospective sessions with your team. It features dedicated sections to assess your campaigns' goals, successes, challenges and key learnings.
You can easily drag items around and leave comments as you communicate and collaborate with team members. Visualize financial data using widgets, images, charts and graphs sourced from Visme's library. As you proceed, you’ll see how different ideas come together.
With its clean and professional design, this template offers a comprehensive overview of your project's status at a glance. It provides a centralized space where you can display critical information, milestones, tasks and timelines, ensuring that your team members and stakeholders are always well-informed.
With this template, you can effectively communicate project updates, identify bottlenecks and ensure that everyone involved has a clear understanding of the project's progress.
Tailor the template to your project's unique needs. Adjust the layout, colors and fonts to align with your brand or project requirements. Add or remove sections as necessary to make it a perfect fit for your specific project.
With its sleek and modern design, this template offers a comprehensive framework to showcase your sales projections, targets and strategies. It provides a visually engaging platform where you can outline your budgetary goals, highlight key metrics and present your sales plan with confidence.
The template also offers various chart and graph options to showcase sales trends, revenue forecasts, market share and more. These visual elements help your audience grasp complex information quickly and make informed decisions.
With its modern and sleek design, this template offers a versatile framework to showcase your strategic objectives, goals and action plans.
It provides a visually engaging platform where you can confidently outline your strategies, highlight key milestones and present your roadmap.
Tailor the template to your specific needs and brand identity. Customize the colors, fonts and layout to align with your company's branding guidelines. Add your logo, images, or other visuals to enhance your presentation's impact.
Visme has a shortcut feature that helps you find everything in Visme with just a tap on the keyboard. Just type the “/” key on your keyboard and a menu will pop up where you can search for everything you need.
This comprehensive template serves as a valuable tool for capturing and organizing the key details of your executive committee meetings.
With a clean and professional layout, it simplifies the process of recording critical information, enabling you to focus on the substance of your discussions.
The template can be easily customized to suit your specific needs and preferences, allowing you to tailor it to your executive committee's unique requirements.
You can share this worksheet electronically with committee members or print it for those who prefer physical copies. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and has access to the meeting minutes.
We are thrilled to present our Interactive Content Statistic Infographic Template, designed to transform complex data into a visually stunning and easily digestible format.
This template is perfect for marketers, content creators and businesses seeking to convey the impact and effectiveness of their content marketing strategies. With its vibrant colors, eye-catching icons and interactive elements, this infographic template ensures that your statistics leave a lasting impression on your audience.
With Visme, you can choose from 20+ types of charts and graphs for data visualization and 30+ data widgets to show your project progress.
Visme’s collaborative design features will make your collaboration and brainstorming sessions more effective and streamlined. Your team members can review, respond to and resolve comments, pin annotations, add sticky notes and more.
With the live editing feature, any collaborator can make changes to a design project and the changes will appear live.
Are you tired of juggling multiple documents and struggling to keep your meeting agendas organized? Then this template is right up your alley.
This template is perfect for individuals, teams, or organizations seeking an efficient and visually appealing way to outline and track meeting agendas. With its clean and minimalist design, the Meeting Agenda Whiteboard Template allows you to stay focused on the important topics and objectives of your meetings.
With its modern design and versatile slides, this template empowers you to deliver a persuasive and visually stunning presentation.
The presentation template includes a range of pre-designed slides that cover all the essential elements of a sales strategy. From introducing your company and goals to outlining your target audience, sales tactics and performance metrics, the template offers a well-rounded set of slides to effectively communicate your sales strategy.
Use Visme's AI image generator to create stunning images, icons, illustrations and other graphics for your presentation. This will enhance the visual appeal, making it more engaging and easier for your team members to comprehend.
A Amazon 6-pager is great for optimizing meetings and can help to speed things up when compared to traditional meetings. Inspired and introduced from Jeff Bezos. It's made to summarize key items in a maximum of six pages. It helps the team to focus on only what matters, keep everyone on the same page and helps to neatly document all this information in a quick readable format.
This Amazon six-pager comes with a modern design, with colorful yet balanced pallet. You can customize each aspect of this it to match your meeting goals. This template includes all the sections needed, such as an introduction, goal, business state, strategic priorities and more.
Now we will explore some of the common mistakes you should avoid when you’re planning for your weekly meetings or during those meetings.
When writing out the agenda for a meeting, avoid using unactionable phrases to name the task. Instead, frame them as questions.
So instead of "Discuss Launch Approach," you can rewrite this as "What approach should we take for our upcoming launch?" This little tweak can inspire critical thinking and shift the focus of the meeting to be solution-centered.
Just because everyone in the meeting got invited does not guarantee they all feel included. And this is a detrimental assumption to make.
However, as the meeting facilitator, you have to ensure all attendees feel comfortable sharing their opinions and asking questions.
Studies indicate that teams with higher collective intelligence tend to have more and equal participation from team members. To make the most of the time spent in a meeting, it is essential to establish a welcoming environment that encourages participation from all attendees.
As the meeting facilitator, it's not enough to just prepare the agenda for the meeting and pass it all around to the attendees before the meeting. During the meeting, you also have to be proactive in steering the conversation in line with the agenda.
By structuring your weekly meetings effectively, you can maximize your potential for collaboration, decision-making and progress.
With Visme, the days of inefficient meetings and disjointed teamwork are a thing of the past. From creating visually stunning presentations to facilitating interactive discussions, Visme enables you to design and deliver impactful meetings.
Visme also simplifies the coordination of tasks and enhances overall team efficiency by centralizing communication and project management within the platform.
Additionally, Visme offers a rich array of integrations with other popular business tools, such as project management software and communication platforms. This integration capability enables a smooth workflow and minimizes the need for switching between multiple applications, providing a consolidated workspace for teams.
Sign up for Visme today to start conducting more productive weekly meetings.
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