10 tips for effective meeting participation

Actionable advice on meetings

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

In our corporate life, we all have attended at least one meeting. Everyone has made mistakes during their initial meetings, I did some too. With this article, I am enlisting some of the things that I learnt and improved myself upon. Here you go.

1. Always join the meeting at least a couple of minutes in advance, be it an offline meeting or an online. Your colleagues will consider you punctual with time.
2. Always carry a pen and a notebook to the meetings. Take notes as much as you want. Be creative and try visuals instead of plain text.
3. Audio record the meeting with permission from the speaker and the participants. Take screenshots that you can use for annotations and analysis.
4. Listen to the speaker carefully. In case of any doubt or question, do not hesitate to ask. You may never know you may never get a chance to ask in future.
5. Greet the meeting participants at the beginning of the meeting and at the end of meeting. It’s a common courtesy.
6. Actively participate in meeting discussions and provide your perspective too. Your perspective may provide a new direction to the discussion that others may not have thought of.
7. In case, you are assigned some action items from the meetings, do get to know the deadline for the items. Do not assume anything.
8. Dress well for both online and offline meetings. For a remote online meeting, you may never know you might need to start your camera.
9. In online meeting, observe your background in the video if it’s appropriate. Use software provided backgrounds. Do check if you are on mute or if you camera is on. Accidentally you might unmute yourself or you may show yourself on video. Avoid embarrassment.
10. Always be humble to the participants. Accept criticism/feedback. And improve yourself.