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Each morning, you emphatically write at the top of your to-do list, “Work on presentation!” Perhaps you even underline it a time or two for emphasis. But at the end of the day, your resolve has turned to dismay: yet again, you spent most of your time in meetings. And when you had a bit of time between them, you didn’t make any progress on your presentation………Continue reading….
Source: Harvard Business Review
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The term “meeting” may refer to a lecture (one presentation), seminar (typically several presentations, small audience, one day), conference (mid-size, one or more days), congress (large, several days), exhibition or trade show (with staffed stands being visited by passers-by), workshop (smaller, with active participants), training course, team-building session and kick-off event.
Common types of meeting include:
- Committee meeting, a coming-together of a defined subset of an organization
- Investigative meeting, generally when conducting a pre-interview, exit interview or a meeting among the investigator and representative
- Kickoff meeting, the first meeting with a project team and the client of the project to discuss the role of each team-member
- Town hall meeting, an informal public gathering.
- Work meeting, which produces a product or intangible result such as a decision; compare working group.
- Board meeting, a meeting of the board of directors of an organization
- Management meeting, a meeting among managers
- Staff meeting, typically a meeting between a manager and those that report to that manager
- Team meeting, in project contexts – a meeting among colleagues working on various aspects of a team project.
Other varieties include breakfast meetings off-site meetings (or Awayday meetings in the UK), and “stand-up meetings” where participants stand up to encourage brevity. Since a meeting can be held once or often, the meeting organizer has to determine the repetition and frequency of occurrence of the meeting: one-time, recurring meeting, or a series meeting such as a monthly “lunch and learn” event at a company, church, club or organization in which the placeholder is the same, but the agenda and topics to be covered vary. In Russian, a “flying meeting”.
Meetings have been studied using conversation analysis. Meetings are thought of as a distinct speech exchange system with different norms and rules. Participants may move in and out of the conversation exchange system during the meeting. A meeting will often have a chair who has some control over the discussion in the meeting. The chair may have a superior position in a social hierarchy or be appointed as a facilitator.
The beginning of the meeting speech exchange system is often indicated by nonverbal cues, or stating the purpose of the meeting. In formal meetings, the chair has control over turn-taking in a conversation. In informal meetings the participants often decide for themselves who turn taking functions with the chair occasionally intervening. Non-verbal communication with the chair may be used to take a turn.
Often the chair will control the choice of topic of discussion, different chairs will control the conversation in different ways. A pre-closing formulation is an individual’s summarization of the groups understanding of a topic. Silence is often used to indicate agreement to this final formalization. Turns within a topic are expected to be related to previous turns of the topic as a whole. In settings turns are long and more loosely related to the previous turns. In these cases, the speaker may introduce the subject matter of the turn and related it to the agenda topic.
Event management might be a tool for strategic marketing and communication, used by companies of every size. Companies can benefit from promotional events as a way to communicate with current and potential customers. For instance, these advertising-focused events can occur as press conferences, promotional events, or product launches. Event managers may also use traditional news media in order to target their audience, hoping to generate media coverage which will reach thousands or millions of people.
They can also invite their audience to their events and reach them at the actual event. An event venue may be an onsite or offsite location. The event manager is responsible for operations at a rented event or entertainment venue as they are coordinating directly with the property owner. An event manager will monitor all aspects of the event on-site. Some of the tasks listed in the introduction may pass to the venue, but usually at a cost.
Events present substantial liability risk to organizers and venues. Consequently, most venues require the organizers to obtain blanket or event-specific general liability insurance of an amount not less than $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate, which is the industry standard. Corporate event managers book event venues to host corporate meetings, conferences, networking events, trade shows, product launches, team-building retreats or training sessions in a more tailored environment.
Event management software companies provide event planning with software tools to handle many common activities such as delegate registration, hotel booking, travel booking, or allocation of exhibition floor space. A recent trend in event technology is the use of mobile apps for events. This technology is advancing and allowing event professionals to simplify and manage intricate and simple events more effectively. Mobile apps have a range of uses. They can be used to hold relatively static information such as the agenda, speaker biographies, and general FAQs.
They can also encourage audience participation and engagement through interactive tools such as live voting/polling, submitting questions to speakers during Q&A, or building live interactive “word clouds”. Mobile event apps can also be used by event organizers as a means of communication. The mobile apps help to make a better overall outcome of events and also help to remove a lot of a tedious work from event organizers.
Organizers can communicate with participants through the use of alerts, notifications, and push messages. They can also be used to collect feedback from the participants through the use of surveys in app. Some mobile event apps can help participants to engage with each other, with sponsors, and with the organizers with built-in networking functionality.
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