Let's be honest, bad meetings suck.
Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into time for solo work that’s equally essential for creativity and efficiency.
However, without meetings, cooperation, communication, coordination, consensus, and decision-making will all be compromised. In fact, teamwork and collaboration often requires meeting to brainstorm and facilitate new ideas. So the elimination of bad meetings is the true goal.
The good news is, we’ve found that changing the way your team and your organization approach meetings is feasible.
After researching the meeting methods of the most advanced companies in the tech industry, Feishu has developed the best conferencing method called SamePage Method and practiced it ourselves for several months to demonstrate its effectiveness.
This article will explain how SamePage Method works and why it is effective.
Note: Don't have time to read? Watch this corresponding video tutorial where it explains all of the important concepts in detail.
Here’s an example of how it plays out:
- 1.Before the meeting
Suppose you're having a weekly meeting with your team. Before a meeting, go to our Template Center, which provides various meeting templates to support the need to create high-quality meeting notes.
After creating the meeting agenda, send the document to participants before the meeting.
2. In the meeting
Several minutes before the meeting started, participants read the materials silently. During the discussion, each person can express their own views and ask questions via the Comment feature. The significance of commenting is not only its contribution to high-quality discussion but also an equal chance to contribute among members.
After participants finish reading and commenting, the meeting moderator starts discussing each comment in order. This magic part is, participants can directly edit the document through the screen if they need to add or modify the document, which improves engagement significantly.
3. After the meeting
After the discussion, a to-do list is attached below each topic and the person in charge is @mentioned next to the to-do item.
You may ask, why is this method effective?
- •First of all, the first few minutes to read silently provide solo and deep thinking without the interference from others. It also ensures that no one arrived unprepared for the meeting.
- •Second, brainstorming is guided by the comments so that a discussion is more straightforward and targets the most important questions. At the sametime, it reduces the length of the meeting and skips the trivial parts.
- •The summary of the meeting and to-do lists are provided at the end so that the next steps are clearly defined.
Wanna try the SamePage Meeting method? Here is the quick instruction for you!
SamePage Method Instruction
- 1.Prepare relevant meeting documents and materials prior to the meeting.
- 2.Once the meeting starts, all participants read the document for 15 minutes silently, leave comments and raise questions for further discussion. Once finished reading, participants can click the Finished Reading button to synchronize their reading progress with the host.
- 3.When most participants finish reading, everyone will discuss the comments one by one, solve the issues immediately or clarify confusions.
- 4.At the end of the meeting, the presenter will add to-dos to the document, clarify upcoming tasks, expected timelines, and @ task owners.
- 5.Each owner checks off their to-do list after the task is completed, keeping the team updated.
Learn more!
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