In today’s remote and hybrid workforce, regular in-person meetings are more critical than ever. Face-to-face gatherings reunite disenfranchised teams, reinforce client and company relations, and ensure that your people are on the same page. There’s a fine art to executing a successful and beneficial meeting. But it can be a slippery slope. And, if done poorly, can be a colossal error that’s made in front of most of your stakeholders and coworkers. Here are some of the most common meeting planning mistakes that can happen to you.
Meeting Planning Mistake #1: Unclear Objectives
Muddled meeting messaging is a waste of valuable time and money. Not having a clear objective or goal for your meeting can quickly derail you. Ensuring that your messaging is clear, concise, and consistent is critical. Making the content motivating, engaging, and seamless increases the likelihood of successful attendee take-aways.
Meeting Planning Mistake #2: Unrealistic Budget
Meetings are a necessary business expenditure. On paper, the ROI may not be readily visible, as many meetings are held for professional housekeeping reasons. But the reality is, consistent in-person meetings are fundamental for business growth.
Therefore it’s important that your meeting budget is healthy and not based on anemic, wishful budgeting. Ensuring you’re building a budget based on realistic projected spends is essential for setting the stage for productive engagement.
Your budget should be a living, breathing document that is consistently updated, as projections are replaced with actuals. And don’t forget to capture changes as they occur, especially onsite. These will give you a better handle on your budget for the years to come.
Meeting Planning Mistake #3: Not Vetting a Destination
When your team is travelling in, it is mandatory that the destination tickets multiple boxes. It needs to be easily accessible for flights or those driving. The city must have the appropriate infrastructure to support your group size and accommodation needs. And it needs to be friendly to your budget, extracurricular experiences, and your guests.
Be sure to also check the calendar for the destination. Plopping your meeting down in a city that is overloaded can mean less attention on your group.
Not weighing the impact of a few options is an easy meeting planning mistake to make. But failing to do so can be costly! Site selections are mandatory!
Meeting Planning Mistake #4: Not Doing a Site Inspection
Once you’ve selected the city, it’s essential that you visit your potential host hotels and venues before signing on the dotted line. Every option can look great in pictures. Seeing them firsthand is an entirely different matter. How far are the meeting rooms from the guest elevator? What is the neighborhood like for the offsite venue you’re considering? What is the level of service of the hotel and suppliers? When you’re bringing together your team, clients and/or sponsors, choosing a meeting location sight unseen is a huge meeting planning mistake. Understanding what your attendee experience will be is critical to planning a smooth meeting.
Meeting Planning Mistake #5: Poor Programming
You found the space. You’ve built the budget. Now you must build the schedule and content. A huge meeting planning mistake can happen when people fail to ensure that their programming is engaging and varied.
Putting people in back-to-back, droning meetings, without a variety of experiences, will lead to information overload and disengagement. It’s important to keep the interest of your audience by stitching together a menagerie of events that are interactive and interesting. Break up break outs with intermittent wellness activities. Pepper in unstructured networking moments for authentic connections. And even schedule…not having a schedule! Don’t lose site of the fact that attendees still need down time. Slate open periods of time in the program. Allow them to reconnect with family, answer emails, or to simply decompress in order to be their best selves.
Meeting Planning Mistake #6: Not Having a Pulse on Registration
Over capacity or under capacity…either scenario means trouble for your event flow and budget. Not having a handle on your registration can be a disaster in the making. Discovering that you’re over – or even worse, under – your projected numbers is a huge meeting planning mistake. Your attendees are the heartbeat of your meeting. It’s important for you to keep the pulse.
Meeting Planning Mistake #7: Understaffing!
You can’t be everywhere all at once. A glaring meeting planning mistake is to underestimate the directions you’ll be pulled during your event. It’s important to have a team on the ground that is there to keep the program on track. Having dedicated staff at every meeting, guest interaction, and food-and-beverage event is essential to smoothness.
Meeting Planning Mistake #8: Not Leaving Room
Not leaving room in your agenda is setting yourself up for failure! But what does ‘not leaving room’ mean? It’s not leaving room for the What If’s, the What Now’s, or the Why Nots! The best laid plans sometimes go awry…for the good and the bad. Not providing buffers for mistakes or magic is a common meeting planning mistake.
Recognize that your meeting is the foundation for human connectivity. It is important to give space for those organic connections. Perhaps your welcome reception extends another hour because the guests are having fun. Or maybe it’s your electrifying speaker, who is connecting with the audience.
In the same vein, not budgeting for potential unforeseen challenges also sets you up for failure. If your event is planned down to the minute, it will be a domino effect when the timeline starts to go off the rails. Not to mention, the level of stress it will cause will be compounded with each tick of the clock hands.
Giving a window of wiggle room will help keep your meeting in motion, even if it wobbles slightly off schedule.
Meeting Planning Mistake 9: Not Having a Back-Up Plan
Capt. Edward A. Murphy said it best. “If anything can go wrong, it will.” Not having a contingency plan for your meeting elements is one of the worst meeting planning mistakes you can make.
Have a back-up for your back-up. Plan pivot options in case of inclement weather, sickness, or tech issues. And always, always have a detailed Run of Show. If someone needs to pinch hit on your behalf, having a document that outlines absolutely every element of the meeting is critical.
Meeting Planning Mistake #10: Not Hiring the Right Partners!
You can plan for all the what ifs you can think of, but the truth is, you don’t know what you don’t know. You need a trusted – and certified – meeting planner in your corner They do this day in and day out. Working with a partner who understands the nuanced complexity of a meeting will save you time, money, and stress!
The good news…we know a couple of people! Contact our team of certified meeting planners today. We’ll help you avoid meeting planning mistakes!
