The Importance of Meeting Follow-up
What is Meeting Follow-up?
Meeting Follow-up can be best defined as the action made after a gathering discussion. For a company the main goal is success in business. It provides a system to help regulate the order of business and such order helps the achievement of success. A company will use tools in their system and keep the order sustained, to maintain a vivid focus on its goal.
One such important tool used to maintain order in a company is the business meeting. Business meetings can be considered a period of meditation since the meetings discuss important issues that is worth meditating about.
For example, a meetings topic was about how production is decreasing since the last month due to product failure, thus meeting was proposed in order to amplify that such mistakes should be minimized by finding a way to avoid these product failures, since the failures are affecting the company’s production at a critical point. Now the follow-up would be applying the agreement made to minimize the product failure in a daily basis. What is the importance of follow-up after a meeting?
The Importance of Meeting Follow-up
Business meetings are without doubt the best tool for a company for the fact that it provides crucial information about the company’s progress and how well is business. In other words business meetings are used to show the company’s achievements as well as the company’s weaknesses.
This is why it’s important to follow up after a meeting, because a company’s success depends on the follow up after a business meeting. When you follow-up after a meeting it shows others you care and that you have a desire to succeed.
Not every meetings agreement is successful, sometimes it may contain glitches along the way, thus is important to follow-up because you will notice these glitches and allow the team to troubleshoot the problem and come up with another agreement. Remember the point of follow-up is to learn to solve the problem.
How do I follow-up after a Meeting
Another form of follow-up is to have additional meetings to visualize if the agreement is working well. The purpose of the meeting would be a total waste if the agreement would still be in application and later realized perhaps a year later that the problem still persists.
It is then recommended to propose these additional meetings as a check-point to the agreement and it is suggested to record the data of the work or follow-up for the meeting to have as a reference incase of a need for a new solution. These meetings can serve to reduce and solve any form of frustration.
Referring back to the decreasing production illustration, let’s say that the company is a lock assembling company and let’s imagine that the agreement is to reduce the amount of grease used since it was found that the grease was causing the locks to fail. Later it was found that without using the same amount of grease the locks mechanical parts wouldn’t flow smoothly so then it was causing it hard to test the locks.
If check-point meetings are used then it would help to try to come up with another solution to solve the problem. This certainly reduces stress and frustration for the assembler, a positive thing since you don’t want to give the impression that the after all results are stressing and frustrating for the reason being that you want your employees to see the meetings as something positive.
Meeting Follow-up Additional Steps
It is indeed that you will get the expected results when you follow-up after a meeting. You want to use the time to follow-up for every meeting by having additional brief meetings to know where and how does the agreement stand. To remind yourself you may want to include it in an agenda or a proposal, for it will be a form reminding yourself.
After the meeting you may want to ask yourself daily, have I been following the terms of agreement? Have I been proposing meetings at a regular basis as follow-up? If you tend to ask yourself these simple questions it is without doubt that you will be reminded forcing you to accept and follow the agreement.
Summarize your work and have in mind what have you done differently, since the agreement, this will help out on the follow-up meetings if there is to discuss a change. Notice what have other employees done to try to apply the agreement that was created in the meeting. This will allow you to brainstorm if the ideas where good or not and if you want to add to the changes.
Finally try to understand your work, understand how the agreement is affecting you, is it causing frustration? If it is, it is suggested to include such information in the follow-up meetings to try to come to an agreement for a different and better solution.
You also may want to have a written document of the agreement, sometimes when companies are given spikes many tend to forget about other important tasks, for the reason being the employees are trying with much effort to send the order through.
It is recommended to have the agreement in a written document or somewhere where it can remind you in a daily basis, a place where you may see the written document everyday can be at your regular work station. Remember we want to never forget about meeting follow-up since it is considered the most significant strategy to be a successful company.
Also for best results you may want to prepare for the follow-up meeting to brainstorm an alternative idea possible if a new solution is needed. By preparing you may want to include every detail of the issue the meeting was promoting to resolve.
For example, referring back to the lock company illustration, the preparation will include the data of the failure locks, such as what locks failed? What about the locks failed? When they failed? Who tested the locks and etc? And, how they failed? Have amongst the people present such important data declared in order to come up with the best solution to the issue.
