Poorly run collaborative meetings become quick reminders of awful high school group projects.
Some people talk too much or do the lion’s share of the work. Others don’t engage at all. And in the worst case scenario: Some people simply don’t show up.
But when run well, collaborative meetings move the company forward with new ideas, products, and solutions. Different teams and departments get the chance to come together to brainstorm, problem-solve, and innovate.
In this article, we’ll dive into how you can successfully host collaborative meetings to foster new ideas that drive business growth.
What is a collaboration meeting?
A collaboration meeting is a real-time discussion where teams gather together to achieve a common goal.
Sometimes referred to as a collaborative meeting or team meeting, these conversations require participants to prepare their ideas beforehand.
Prior to the meeting, participants should understand their roles in the project so they can arrive with ideas to contribute to the wider solution. This allows for a smoother meeting driven by purpose.
As teams collaborate, they begin to weave together ideas that solve problems from multiple angles. This means the solutions impact the whole system — not just one area.
These meetings aren’t just a place for listening. Everyone should actively engage and participate for a truly interactive, multi-perspective outcome.
There’s no one goal for collaboration meetings, either — the purpose can vary. Some might focus on creating something new, like a product or a plan. Others might concentrate on overcoming a challenge that’s arisen in a project involving multiple teams. And still others might look to improve current processes to enhance inter-departmental efficiency.
Whatever its purpose, by the end of a collaboration meeting, participants should understand each others’ roles and the next steps they each need to take to progress toward the agreed-upon goal.
When should you host a collaboration meeting?
Collaboration meetings work best when you need everyone's input to create or improve something together. This means they work best for certain situations.
For example, you wouldn’t host a collaboration meeting for a general update or a solo presentation.
In a collaboration meeting, everyone's ideas count, and you’re aiming to create something new together by the end.
What are collaboration meetings used for?
Here are some examples of when collaboration meetings work well:
Strategy and planning: You might use a collaboration meeting to devise a project plan, create a work breakdown structure, or develop a risk assessment and mitigation strategy.
Offering a new service: You could collaborate on defining a new service offering, coming up with a new service delivery process, or developing training materials.
Seeking fresh insights: Collaboration meetings don’t have to be internal. You might use them to share cross-departmental knowledge to solve a problem or devise a new idea. You can also host collaborative customer focus groups to overcome a product issue or invite industry experts to brainstorm on a specific service requirement.
Solving a specific problem: Use a collaboration meeting to conduct a root-cause analysis on a problem that affects multiple departments. You might also use one to develop a crisis management plan or devise a troubleshooting guide for a particular process.
Kicking off a new campaign: Use collaborative sessions to brainstorm campaign ideas, develop engagement strategies, or analyze a campaign launch and discuss adjustments.
Here’s a quick list of the types of meetings that aren’t collaboration meetings:
- Training sessions
- Company-wide updates
- Webinars and lectures
- Sales meetings
Why? There’s no common goal, not everyone participates, and the meetings don’t result in the creation of something new.
Benefits of collaboration meetings
Collaboration meetings value diversity. In bringing together people with different skills, backgrounds, and experience levels, you work toward a common goal, sparking innovation and creativity in the process.
Interactive participation in collaboration meetings exposes the group to a wide array of perspectives and specialties. This diversity fuels innovative, resilient solutions.
Teams tackle challenges from multiple angles, creating holistic solutions. Unlike a simple, isolated idea, varied skills, experiences, and specialisms make it easier to consider various potential impacts that team members might not have imagined alone.
As a group, this gives you better visibility over how effective strategies might be at managing these potential impacts effectively.
But it’s not just about having innovative ideas. In collaborative team meetings, participation is key.
Good collaboration promotes increased engagement from all meeting participants. When each member has the chance to contribute their unique insights, the meeting experience is enhanced, and everyone gets a sense of ownership and accountability over the common goal.
Plus, with a more comprehensive array of insights, your team gets a far deeper understanding of the issue at hand. Employees get to see how different departments interact and align with the company’s goals in a much broader sense than before. This builds a strong sense of unity within and across teams.
With a more collaborative approach in general, you see better alignment across the whole business, helping to drive broader business growth.
How to plan a successful collaborative meeting
The meeting-planning process sets the tone for innovative solutions and effective teamwork.
Here's how to make your collaboration meetings productive and engaging:
1. Define the collaborative goal
Start by clearly articulating the meeting’s purpose and the outcome you’re looking for. Understanding why it’s necessary in the first place will help keep it on track.
SMART goals — goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound — can be especially helpful here.
Here’s what a smart goal might look like for a collaborative meeting within a marketing team:
Develop a new marketing strategy that will increase customer engagement by 20% within two months.
2. Set clear expectations
Make sure all attendees know the purpose of the meeting and what successful collaboration looks like in this context.
Establish clear expectations around participation, too. How would you like everyone to join in, and how much participation is expected? What form will this take?
Finally, set ground rules for communication and respectful behavior. Emphasize active listening to avoid interruptions and encourage everyone to value diverse perspectives.
3. Leverage asynchronous preparation
Asynchronous brainstorming before a collaboration meeting can help inspire ideas before everyone comes together.
Encourage individuals to prepare their own thoughts and discuss them with their closest team members using online collaboration tools or shared documents. That way, everyone arrives at meetings a few steps ahead.
Create meeting agendas and background materials, and circulate these before the meeting. This way, everyone’s on the same page and you don’t have to catch anyone up. This will help keep meetings short and to-the-point.
6 tips for more effective collaborative meetings
Here are a few handy pointers to foster better collaboration so that your meetings result in cohesive solutions that combine the best of everyone’s skills.
1. Assign leadership roles for the meeting
Leadership roles can help facilitate collaboration as everyone looks to each other to come together as a team.
You might assign a facilitator, timekeeper, and notetaker, for example. The facilitator guides the conversation, prompts questions, and mediates power struggles. The timekeeper makes sure discussions move forward efficiently. The notetaker ensures all important contributions are documented to help align progress with decisions later on.
Encourage participants to provide constructive feedback to these leaders. This feedback can help leaders refine the structure to improve the meeting experience in the future.
2. Facilitate collaborative techniques
Think about the tools you’ll need to encourage collaborative techniques.
Visual collaboration tools, for example, can help provide a shared space for participants to see collective thinking unfold. This promotes collective ownership.
Plus, these tools enable everyone to contribute directly and build on each other’s thoughts.
Whiteboards, mind maps, and online sharing tools can help individuals exchange ideas in visual ways during collaborative meetings.
3. Actively encourage participation
Diverse perspectives are crucial for your collaborative attempts to be successful.
But it’s not always easy for people to share in large groups.
Consider the tactics you’ll use to make sure everyone’s voice is heard. You might facilitate round-robin sessions, for example, so that everyone can speak one at a time. Alternatively, you might try breakout groups to encourage introverted participants to contribute since they won’t face the pressure of everyone’s attention at once.
By encouraging everyone to engage in an interactive way, you nurture collaboration.
4. Challenge assumptions and encourage healthy debate
To bring ideas together, you need to be able to unpack and challenge contributions without making this seem like a personal attack.
Encourage respectful questioning and discussion to explore different viewpoints. Meeting facilitators should model this behavior with open questions that invite contributors to play the devil’s advocate to their own ideas or explain it within the context of a potential risk they might see.
Remember, though: Before anyone jumps in to criticize, make sure the group hears everyone. Sometimes, conflicting viewpoints naturally iron themselves out as better suggestions come forward.
5. Work toward building consensus
Healthy debate is important, as it helps you refine your ideas.
But the true aim of a collaborative meeting is to find common ground so that you can reach a decision that everyone supports.
Try focusing on participants' interests rather than their specific positions. This is less about the rock-solid idea and more about what they’re hoping to achieve.
Encourage participants to build on each others’ ideas rather than shooting them down. The “yes and…” technique works well here. So, rather than saying, “Yes, but this might fail because of XYZ,” say, “Yes, and this secondary idea will help protect your idea from X risk.”
When it comes to making a final decision, consider having a ranking system rather than a straight vote. By doing this, more people will reach a consensus on at least one of their choices, even if it isn’t their number-one preference.
6. Follow up with actionable steps
Follow up the meeting with a summary of the action items, key decisions, and deadlines.
A tool like Motion can help you distribute these tasks so that everyone has visibility over their roles in one centralized place.
Using AI-powered scheduling, Motion helps teams prioritize tasks so everyone’s working on the right tasks at the right times for streamlined progress toward your common goal.
And if priorities shift or unexpected changes happen, Motion will automatically reshuffle everyone’s schedules to accommodate these things and keep the project on track.
Make sure you establish other collaboration and communication channels so that everyone knows the best ways to stay connected, share updates, and get feedback on their progress.
If you use Motion, tagging and commenting are the best ways to synchronize communication threads with the task they’re related to. All communication resides within a central location, organized clearly by task. Plus, automated notifications keep everyone updated in real time, so nobody misses anything relevant or important to their role.
Easily schedule successful collaboration meetings with Motion
Collaboration meetings form the backbone of all successful businesses. They arm employees with context, shape projects with creativity, and nurture innovation through effective teamwork.
Motion’s platform is custom-designed to streamline and optimize collaboration opportunities. With AI-powered task scheduling, deadline management, and effortless team scheduling, you’ll free up hours’ worth of administrative duties. All this free time means you can focus your efforts on encouraging information sharing and creative thinking in collaborative meetings.
If you’re ready to experience the ease of automated team scheduling, try out Motion for free.
