8 Types Of Meetings And Their Purpose Of Use

All types of meetings are infamous for transforming a two-sentence communication into an hour-long conversation.

Just so many time-wasting meetings have made many professionals wary of the whole concept of holding a meeting.

Relevantly, 67% of employees say that spending a significant amount of their time puts them off from their job.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.

You can ensure that every meeting is fruitful and meaningful with thorough planning and excellent leadership.

However, to make your meetings rather productive, it is critical to be able to distinguish the types of internal meetings that are common in organizations.

This article touches on the types of meetings as well as each type’s purpose for use by a company.

The common types of meetings

1. Standup/ Status Meeting

The meetings for the status update are also known as check-in meetings, standup, or progress meetings/ checks. And they are designed to keep all parties involved and informed about the status of a project.

In these types of meetings, you can talk about your progress, the problems you’ve faced, and the next steps that will influence your future actions.

Throughout a progress meeting, you should ensure that three important questions are addressed:

• What has happened since our previous meeting?
• What further has to be done?
• What should we concentrate on next?

The goal of such types of meetings is to ensure that the project is moving forward and to hold all parties accountable for their commitments.

Such meeting also allows you to ask direct questions to other team members, such as:

• Is there anything preventing you from working on this project?
• Do you need anything from anyone to finish your tasks?

Nevertheless, status meetings can quickly become boring. Therefore, efficiency should be your primary goal by maintaining focus, sticking to the agenda, and attempting to prevent major shocks that could derail the meeting.

Moreover, at the conclusion of such types of meetings, you should have accomplished the following:

1. Insight into the status of your project
2. A summary of achievements, failures, and obstacles
3. Decisions on how to handle problems
4. A post-meeting action plan with clearly defined duties

2. Introduction Meetings

An introductory meeting might be the initial meeting between two professionals, a team, a department, or potential clients.

The goal of such types of meetings is for everyone concerned to know about each other and to establish certain standards or protocols.

In most cases, the person who requested the meeting leads the discussion.

Moreover, depending on the nature of the topics under discussion, meeting participants can either remain passive or actively contribute meaningfully to the dialogue.

Introduction meetings might also include a sales pitch, a sales demo, or an investor pitch.

3. Private Meetings

Also known as one-on-one meetings, these types of meetings involve two people who already have a working relationship.

The discussion in a private meeting ranges from personal and professional growth to individual accountability.

Additionally, a private meeting may become controversial due to the fact that it may or may not adhere to a timetable.

Meetings with key stakeholders, coaching sessions, and manager-employee meetings are examples of private meetings.

The takeaway is that a personal meeting’s primary purpose is relationship maintenance.

4. Meetings for decision-making

In circumstances when the team needs to get together to agree on a plan of action or propose solutions to a leader who will make the final decision, you will need to hold a decision-making meeting.

Making a recruiting decision or authorizing a design are two examples of these kinds of meetings:

Decision-making meetings are one of the types of formal meetings, and they should have two main goals:

1. What option should you select, and why should you select it over others?
2. Who is responsible for carrying out your decision?

Additionally, you’ll want to make sure you have all of the accessible information for this meeting and that it’s accurate.

It’s also critical to set up your decision-making meeting in a way that keeps you from getting a limited vision.

At the conclusion of such types of meetings, you should make a decision and clearly indicate who will manage the next steps. Furthermore, your team should be sure that:

• All perspectives and viewpoints were appropriately expressed.
• Before making that conclusion, the team thoroughly researched all of the options.
• The subsequent steps will be taken with the appropriate level of dedication.

5. Meetings to solve problems

A problem-solving meeting, like a decision-making meeting, should be called with a single aim in mind: To determine what triggered and how to fix a specific problem.

Such meetings could also be termed as an “event response” meeting where your team gathers to address an urgent problem. It could also be termed as a strategy meeting where you look forward to anticipated difficulties and potential solutions.

In such types of meetings, it is essential to find the answer to the following questions:

• What is the issue (and what triggered it)?
• How can we handle the issue right away?
• How can we stop this from happening again?
• What will be our plan of action, and why?

It’s critical to focus on both the short and long-term goals during a problem-solving meeting. So, determining fundamental causes should be a top priority.

In such a meeting, short-term solutions ought to be quick and simple to adopt, whereas long-term ones may require some time to get started.

You should reach the following conclusions in all problem-solving scenarios:

1. A specific solution that you will implement or a set of reasonable possibilities from which to pick
2. Responsibility assignments, meaning who will manage which aspects of the solution, and so forth.
3. A schedule for implementing your solution.
4. Measures to prevent the situation from recurring

Participants of problem-solving teams will come from all throughout the organization, which allows you to bring together all sorts of knowledge and ideas.

However, while having a varied collection of stakeholders is beneficial for finding innovative solutions, coordinating far too many schedules can soon become a pain. So, it is preferable to employ scheduling automation to easily link team members regardless of where they are.

Read: Video Conferencing & Virtual Meeting Platforms

6. Team-building meetings

Every meeting has the potential for team-building. However, a committed team-building meeting will focus on the team developing a deeper knowledge of one another and strengthening group cohesion.

Moreover, such types of meetings might be structured, unstructured, or a combination of both.

In any case, dedicated team-building meetings should aim to establish an enjoyable environment to achieve the fundamental purpose of connecting your group.

Games, talent shows, creative group classes, and even team happy hours are all popular team-building exercises.

Additionally, these types of meetings can be attended by remote or virtual teams, with activities focused on online involvement, for example, team chat room, video contests, team newsletters, etc.

Lastly, each team-building meeting should help you in achieving the following objectives:

• Increasing teammate trust
• Supporting the group in feeling appreciated and welcomed
• Increasing trust in the group’s mission
• Increasing commitment to completing the task

7. Information-sharing meetings

All meetings convey information, but info-sharing sessions provide a chance to inform the team in-depth on relevant issues. And this might be a presentation, training, discussion, or even a webinar, with group sizes ranging from 1:1 to the entire staff.

The objective here will be to keep attendees attentive, which you can do in a variety of ways:

• Make use of multimedia elements like pictures, videos, and similar
• Pose questions to the audience.
• Incorporate life stories into the data.
• Use surveys and polls to gain attention.
• Use numerous speakers or invited guests.

Maintain a casual format and make an effort to build rapport between the audience and the speaker.

Finally, your team should really have benefited from learning important information that will help them be more effective in their responsibilities and better serve the team.

8. Creativity gatherings meetings

Such types of meetings can also be referred to as brainstorming meetings, and they are frequently between team members that involve a creative element.

Designing new products, creating content for an ad campaign, and producing ideas for prospective new items are some examples of such types of meetings.

Additionally, to be successful, you must create a welcoming environment while following the below crucial pieces of advice:

• At this point, quantity outnumbers quality.
• Avoid overthinking concepts.
• Encourage “out of the box” thinking.

When everything is said and done, your team should be inspired and will likely have accomplished the following objectives:

• Managed to come up with a variety of project ideas.
• Pushed the group’s imagination to its limit
• Increased enthusiasm for the project, which will motivate additional efforts

Why do organizations need to conduct meetings?

Every organization, regardless of its size and sphere of influence, requires team meetings for the following reasons:

1) Enhanced communication

Meetings can assist promote interaction among team members or departments. They can also be used to exchange information with others and receive constructive feedback.

Meetings are used by managers and team leaders to discuss difficult projects, work objectives, and new company regulations.

During these sessions, employees may find it simpler to communicate with management. Moreover, after examining the agenda items and the significance of the ongoing topics of discussion, employees might decide for themselves what topics to discuss.

2) Help with problem-solving

Meetings provide opportunities for participants to contribute solutions to challenges.

It saves a manager or team leader’s time and effort that would otherwise be spent trying to discover solutions separately or talking to team members individually.

These sessions provide an opportunity for everyone in attendance to describe plans and make helpful suggestions on how to address an issue and avoid a repetition of the scenario.

3) Improved team building

During team meetings, team members are likely to become familiar with one another. Furthermore, these sessions allow members to get to know one another and build relationships.

Frequent discussions and meetings can dramatically improve teamwork.

Additionally, meetings are more advantageous for remote work structures since they allow department or team members to become closer and create a level of personal interaction with colleagues.

4) Training opportunities

Meetings such as seminars or training sessions help in the transfer of knowledge to staff.

Experts and other speakers might be invited to these sessions by a company to address specific issues that will benefit the employees.

In addition to this, employees might also benefit from performance review sessions in terms of gathering input to improve their performance.

Lastly, meetings also help the management to do an appraisal, which can boost staff morale and encourage them to work more.

5) Possibilities for innovation

Managers or team leaders can use a meeting to gather positive and innovative suggestions from employees. So, while meetings can assist in solving problems, they can also help to share thoughts and ideas that can help the organization reach its goals and missions.

Of course, an organization’s productivity can be increased by gathering ideas from meetings on effective and resourceful ways to complete work.

Read: Small Business Free Video Conferencing Services in USA

How does WorkHub Scheduling help make your meetings productive?

As this has been touched upon earlier that all types of meetings are believed to be not very productive, and honestly, most often than not, they do not bring any value. However, it is not the team meetings to blame but the way we leverage them.

It will be a lot better for organizations to schedule meetings so the involved parties can prepare themselves in a due manner, handle their tasks well before or after, and, most importantly, make the most out of their meetings.

WorkHub Scheduling is a scheduling software. You can use it to schedule your meetings at the time the participants can collaborate best, making a respective meeting productive as a result. Last but not least, it is one of the most low-cost options available.

You can book a demo here for free to get a better picture of WorkHub Scheduling.