User:Jasminesimon3

= Business Meetings[edit] = A business meeting is an assembly of persons from a partnership, corporation, and profit or non-profit organization. For more than four hundred years, business personnel has gathered in different settings and formats to discuss the progress, challenges, forecasts, and success of their business. Business Meeting Classifications Normally business meetings fall under two primary classifications: Formal and Informal. Formal meetings normally require attendance and formal attire by all participants. Formal meetings are often planned in advance but can be impromptu for major information needing to be disseminated to the company’s executive leadership.

There are various types of business meetings to include but not limited to: •
 * Board meeting: Conducted for members of the board; considered one of the most formal types of meetings with members discussing and deciding on major events that impact the company. •
 * Committee meeting: Conducted for a certain level of the organization’s governance; this level of the meeting is similar to a board meeting but only requiring members of a committee. •
 * Management meeting: Conducted for managers to provide status on issues within a department. •
 * Initiation or Kickoff meeting: Conducted to introduce a project to all stakeholders; considered one of the first tasks in the Initiation phase of modern-day project management. •
 * Weekly status meeting: Conducted as an ongoing project meeting for Project Manager(s) to provide stakeholder(s) with the latest progress on a project. •
 * Brown-bag or work through lunch meeting: Normally conducted to get major work done through collaboration with various teams on a project(s). •
 * Impromptu or Ad-hoc meeting: Conducted randomly, without advance notice; may be due to the major dissemination of information such as layoffs or budget cuts that affect the company. •
 * Offsite meeting: Conducted away from the workplace, normally to accommodate staff and allow for focus outside of work and on the specific topic being discussed.

Structure Benefits[edit]
Business Meetings have a long history of being long, non-productive and not in real-time. According to Steve Blank, Traditional startup board meetings spend an insane amount of wasted time using Fortune 100 company metrics like income statements, cash flow, balance sheet, waterfall charts. The only numbers in those documents that are important in the first year of a startup’s life are burn rate and cash balance. Most board meetings never get past big company metrics to focus on the crucial startup numbers. That’s simply a failure of a startup board’s fiduciary responsibility.

Steve Blank says board meetings occur every 4-6 weeks. While that’s great when you showed up in your horse and buggy, the strategy-to-tactic-to implementation lag is painful at Internet speeds. And unless there’s rigor in the process, because there is no formal structure for follow up, tracking what happened as a result of meeting recommendations and action items gets lost in the daily demands of everyone’s work.

Modern-day business meetings produce results faster. Meetings are more agile, allowing for more frequency of meetings to discuss and resolve daily business challenges as opposed to the traditional format of a follow-up meeting that is several months away. The idea with an Agile meeting is to address issues immediately. If a proposed resolution does not work, go back to drawing board and immediately meet and discuss. The meetings can be considered “sprints”. These meetings get to the heart of the matter faster and often with better results, saving companies time and money.

Modern-day business meeting recognizes the human element. Personnel are not required to wear formal attire for lower-level management meetings as once was required decades ago. Today, business casual could mean wearing khakis with a sweater. This allows participants to feel more relaxed and to focus more on real topics in an organic manner. Today, meeting participants may even be working from home in a web-conference dressed in sweats.

Technology Benefits[edit]
Systems such as GoTo Meeting, WebEx, Microsoft Live Meeting have changed the way companies disseminate information throughout the organization. There are many benefits here.

Modern-day business meetings are more convenient. Historically, meetings were conducted face-to-face (F2F) in office boardrooms. Although this is still a common format, many companies have opted to conduct meetings using technology such as Web-conferencing and Teleconferencing. Up until 2001, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) conducted most of its meetings on and off-site with clients. Some meetings were teleconference meetings, however, during this time, participants could not share screens to actually connect a message with a visual. In 2001, all of this changed with the use of Microsoft Live Meeting where participants could see actual visuals. The Organ transplant community began utilizing this technology to discuss matters of life and death from this point until today.

Modern-day meetings tend to be more cost-effective. Southern States, an agriculture company, began utilizing web-conferencing for the agriculture business in 2006. Employees previously stated that this was a convenient tool that saved them in travel and lodging fees. Some stated that more work actually was accomplished and where some participants were not comfortable with speaking up in meetings, they utilized the “Chat” option to remain anonymous.

Modern-day business meetings provide extend the reach to various audiences. People who normally would not attend a meeting due to other engagements, like having options to attend different web conference dates or view recordings of a meeting.