Introduction

Many people often view holding meetings as being a chore or a distraction from the ‘real’ work they are trying to get on with. This is true of many people in all sorts of different organisations – from giant multi-national corporations through to a small group getting together to organise a local fete. Whatever are personal feelings about organising or attending meetings at the end of the day we must acknowledge that if we are going to work together in a unified group to achieve our joint goals we must be able to communicate effectively with one another. We must all be aware of the organisations goals and our own roles and responsibilities in achieving those shared goals.

At this stage it is worthwhile reminding ourselves what exactly are the point of meetings we are going to hold. All too often organisations hold meetings that do not have a specific reason or agenda to be worked to. Such meetings often ramble on without focus for hours – and achieve very little. This is not good! After attending a few such meetings you are going to find lots of people losing interest and not bothering to come back again – after all everybody feels that their time is precious to them and no one likes the idea of wasting their time on a project that seems to be going nowhere fast!