What Kinds of Team Meetings Are Really Necessary?
Unlike human beings, all business and organizational meetings are not created equal. When deciding on whether to hold a meeting or to use another communication strategy with your team members, you should first consider what type of meeting you need to host. In fact, a number of different meeting formats exist, i.e. whiteboard wall meetings and you can try various options if your present team get-togethers are not as productive and informative as you would like.
Most meetings can be placed into a handful of general categories. The following are some meeting types that typically can’t be replaced with a different means of communication, such as an email or a phone call.
Whiteboard Wall Brainstorming Sessions
Coming up with creative ideas for product launches, new marketing strategies, company website content, and the like can be extremely challenging, even for those who are creative by nature. When team members try to think of innovative ideas on their own, progress is generally difficult to make. For this reason, brainstorming sessions are a vital and necessary aspect of business and organizational life. Although such gatherings are usually less rigidly structured than formal staff meetings and so may feel as if they’re not very productive, simply getting team members’ creative juices flowing and letting them feed off of one another’s thoughts can generate some highly original insights and plans.
Make Your Brainstorming Meetings More Productive with a Whiteboard Wall
Expecting to give birth to an amazing breakthrough at every brainstorming session you hold is a common form of wishful thinking. Pressuring yourself and your team to always produce an outcome can curb creativity and encourage team members to avoid speaking out for fear that they may sound silly or come up with an “incorrect” solution to the problem at hand.
By using the huge open surface of a whiteboard wall, you can ask your team members to call out any ideas that come to mind and then write them all down on the wall, even those that may seem outlandish or unworkable at the time. Then wait until the meeting has ended to sort through the “good” and “bad” ideas to arrive at a tentative plan of action. The objective of productive brainstorming sessions is not to arrive at the perfect outcome every time, but to get the team’s mental juices flowing so that ideas can be more fully developed later.
Expand the Scope and Effectiveness of Meetings with a Smart Marker
Also, with a whiteboard coated wall, it’s effortless to conduct group brainstorming sessions even if some of your team members are located in different states or countries because premium whiteboard coated surfaces may be used in conjunction with Smart Markers, which are regular dry erase markers, preferably low odor, placed into a special smart sleeve that’s connected electronically to a sensor on your whiteboard wall. The sleeve’s internal memory is able to store digitized markings made with a marker. Using this high-tech strategy, you can make your team meetings more collaborative and fruitful by streaming the content produced on your whiteboard coated wall in real-time to all the people in attendance, whatever country or state they may be in. Moreover, the sleeve is able to convey the action at your meeting to others worldwide with the applicable smartphone apps or computer software. The sleeve can also send data to cloud services, making your gatherings genuinely international and bringing the traditional notion of a staff meeting, seminar, or brainstorming session to a whole new level of functionality and collaboration.
In this way, you can transform your whiteboard surface into an enormously effective and potent group communication tool. By coating your office or cubicle wall, desktop, tabletop, or other convenient surface with whiteboard paint, you can quickly create a medium for group interaction by employing Smart Marker technology in combination with your projector or flat-screen display. Quickly use text and graphics to interact with worldwide team members so that all can be linked up and provide input and responses to other’s ideas. You can transfer and live stream the contents written on your whiteboard wall to your desk computer or laptop, then invite your distant colleagues to survey your work in real-time and participate by making comments remotely.
Onboarding Meetings
Bringing someone new to your working team typically involves numerous one-on-one conversations, training sessions, and informal meetings. You and your new team member need to get to know one another, and the team member needs to fully recognize his or her role in the team dynamic and in the company or organization as a whole. Although some aspects of onboarding can be dealt with on an impersonal basis, it’s difficult to effectively receive new employees into the fold and fully inform them about their duties, company policies, and the like without a few person-to-person or video call meetings. So, communicating via email is not a viable option in this case.
Making Onboarding Meetings More Fruitful
Always develop a plan before each onboarding meeting, whether it’s going to be personalized or with your whole team. Establish an objective or intended goal so that all the participants understand the purpose of the discussion. This approach helps your new employees to understand what’s expected of them right away so that they can concentrate on the right content. It also ensures that your present team members come to the meeting prepared and that the first item on the agenda can be initiated with the right tone. Even if the only reason for the meeting is for everyone to get acquainted with one another and have some fun together, make that apparent in a memo to the team that you send beforehand.
Project and Client Kickoff Meetings
Embarking on a new project or starting a relationship with a new client requires communicating a great deal of information that often involves fine details and concepts that are hard to get across to others in an email or chat. Therefore, conducting a face-to-face kickoff meeting is the best option because it lets both your team members and your clients discuss anticipated outcomes, appropriate work strategies, and personal viewpoints without filling up a feed or providing the chance for vital data to go missing in a lost email or an undelivered text message.
All of your team members can ask questions and express their opinions about their personal roles and responsibilities vis-a-vis the upcoming project. And with everyone involved present at the same meeting, various teams and departments can come to recognize how each person’s job assignments fit into the greater whole in order to achieve the desired results. The use of a whiteboard coated wall can be extremely helpful in this context, as the large writing area of the wall will allow every team member to write down the relevant project notes or presentation for others while talking through them in front of the wall and receiving feedback from the client and team members. Due to the easy erasability of the wall, corrections and adjustments can be made on the fly as the meeting progresses and everyone has a chance to present their data.
Kickoff meetings are meant to create enthusiasm in the minds of clients and to present complete synopses of the progress of project plans up to the present time. These whiteboard wall meetings help you and your team members better understand project goals and the steps required to reach them, while also allowing clients to become more confident in the company’s ability to deliver on its promises. Just as in football, after the kickoff, the game starts in earnest and the players (team members) and coaches (managers) assume their respective roles in reaching the goal — a successful outcome for the client.
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