According to Wall Street Journal, office meetings account for the maximum unproductive time more than phone calls, paperwork, e-mails, travels and office gossips. Even in this age of advanced technology, there’s no escape from meetings. So how to conduct creative meetings?
Remember that creative thinking is a journey and not the destination. So all the members involved in the meeting should contribute to the agenda without any fear of rejection. Keep following aspects in mind while conducting a meeting to increase productivity and creativity.
Is this meeting extremely necessary?
First of all, think if the issue can be resolved by telephonic conversation or by talking to 2-3 people in person. If so, there’s no point of arranging a meeting.
If it is really necessary to conduct the meeting, spend some time thinking about the subject before the meeting begins. A meeting without any preliminary work will waste everyone’s time.
Conduct Creative Meetings To Foster Your Company
Creative Meetings To Foster Your Company
Agenda
Decide the agenda of the meeting and note it down. It should be a small list of things to discuss in the meeting and not an endless one. Each and every attendee should contribute to resolving the issues faced by the company by presenting their views on the same.
Humor
Laughing before a meeting is an excellent way to open up minds of the attendees and will help them generate better ideas. Spending 10 to 15 minutes in warming up is really worthwhile.
- Let everyone share some hilarious jokes before starting
- Watching funny videos
- Sharing funny incidents
- You can also laugh without any reason like laughing yoga
Props
If your meeting is for discussing ideas for new design, you can place some props in the meeting room to boost creativity. Give time to attendees to analyse those props and come up with ideas for the new design. Props can be in any form such as news cuttings, advertisements, videos, posters, and the product itself. You can involve your previous designs and their pros and cons analysis too. Such initiative will take your meeting to a new dimension.
Outsider
You should not limit the meeting for only concerned department. If you have an issue regarding sales, you might arrange a meeting only with the sales department. Instead, try to involve people from different departments to get a broader aspect of the problem. Involving people from different department will help you determine the problem from an outsider’s perspective. This will trigger better solutions to the issue and will help fulfilling the agenda of the meeting.
Different Meeting Venues
Venue of the meeting plays a major role in changing the thought process of the attendees and making it one of the creative meetings. If meetings are always held at the meeting room of the company, the possibility is people will come up with same kind of ideas which will hinder innovation. There are a lot of options to choose a meeting venue. You can keep it at some restaurant where attendees are casually dressed, or you can keep it at customers or suppliers premises and involve them in the meeting. There are endless options; you can also keep your meeting at a beach. All you need to do is be creative to get the best outcome from that meeting.
Listen to outrageous ideas
If anyone comes up with some stupid or extreme ideas, don’t reject the idea completely. Instead, you can respond by saying that the idea is quite interesting and how will the idea be helpful to accomplish company goals. Sometimes, you can get a really unconventional idea, but after all that’s what you need to grow.
Celebrate!
Celebrating is really important to motivate your employees to contribute more. Celebrating can be as simple as thunderous applause and handshakes all around. You can also celebrate huge successes by arranging a special dinner or by throwing a party.
Office meetings should be fun to attend and should address the actual agenda. Conducting such creative meetings will help your company to be recognized as a “fun company” and creative people will be attracted to work for such company.