Lucas Campbell is an R&D Manager. He's responsible for developing and executing a new product and commercializing it for the market. This includes leading and directing the R&D Team by distributing workload and ensuring motivation and performance levels are maintained.
It is said that two-thirds of multicultural meetings are unproductive. Not everyone is ready to put up with such horrendous statistics and does not agree to waste a bunch of such valuable resources like time and money. Therefore, this article will compile a list of tips for awesome multilingual meetings that will help make them efficient.
A pre-set goal allows each employee to prepare for a multilingual meeting in their area of responsibility: prepare a report, make a list of current problems, or formulate the top 10 potential solutions with pros and cons in advance. Preparation here is the key to success. After determining the date of the meeting, it is worth formulating its purpose immediately. Then inform all employees about it.
The goal should answer the questions: who, what, where, when, how, and why. For greater inclusion of employees in the multilingual meeting, you can set individual goals depending on the area of responsibility of each. In this way, all participants will have clarity and the opportunity to prepare ideas, suggestions, and questions on the topic.
Your meeting should have tools that will help the group build the process of interaction between participants at all stages of the meeting. Such tools will allow you to design and lead a useful and dynamic meeting, even if you are not a professional facilitator. One of them is equipment like interpreting booths.
The thing is that the final quality of an international event directly depends on the work of simultaneous interpreters, who must focus on creating understanding between participants from different countries, without being distracted by technical conditions or audience noise. That tools, as well as technologies, must fully comply with the requirements of the standard and take into account the necessary level of comfort for its participants.
Timing and discipline is the key to success. Everyone has his or her work tasks that are crucial to complete and this takes time. In a close-knit and friendly team, motivated for results, they always respect their time and the time of their colleagues.
Due to the unpredictable duration of meetings, business calls are rescheduled, incoming messages are ignored, and the optimal time for making other management decisions is missed. To avoid mistakes, it is necessary to write a list of issues that will be discussed at the meeting and calculate how much time it will take. Deposit 20% more than the planned timing. Better to finish sooner rather than later.
Anything that does not help achieve your goals, send for later until the next meeting. You know how it happens: they started talking about one thing, remembered the second, and eventually came to the third.
Meetings become ineffective immediately. After all, efficiency is primarily about achieving goals. Being distracted by extraneous topics, goals can never be achieved. In addition, the format of off-topic meetings relaxes and throws off the working mood of all international employees, including the organizer. A meeting agenda can be created using Workast Meetings to plan the meeting ahead of time to ensure that important topics are discussed.
Make it a point to prepare for multilingual meetings and invite only those who are needed to complete the tasks at hand. Extra employees can distract the organizers and interpreters from the topic, offer incompetent solutions and thereby reduce the effectiveness of the meeting, taking up time.
Based on the purpose of the meeting, you should list employees who can directly affect its achievement or specialists who make final decisions. Please, invite only those who are really needed.
You can only control what is recorded. So at the meeting, you can't do without a protocol. It is necessary to record not only the results of the meeting but everything. This way you don’t miss anything critical, and the company develops a culture of fixing the results immediately after they appear.
This saves time and makes work clearer and more consistent. To avoid mistakes, appoint a recorder - a person who will record all ideas and decisions during the meeting. The easiest way to do this is using the meetings function in Workast. The meetings app in Workast creates a place where you can keep meeting minutes. All the attendees will have access to this live file so you can refer back to it once the meeting is over.
Properly built communication at a multilingual meeting will help not only save time but also increase business efficiency. After all, there is nothing better than employees offering one solution after another because they know the purpose of the meeting. And the time frame does not stretch until the evening, because you do not go away from the topic and follow the timing.
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