Elevating Work travel: onsite Meetings

Next up in our series, Elevating Work Travel, is how to get the most out of your meetings while working from a different city. To me, if you can get yourself to your destination with minimized inconveniences, maximized efficiency and doing your non-negotiables, you’ve done 50% of the work for being successful upon arrival. You won’t have the looming stress of travel, so all of your focus can go into being the best in your meetings. Here are my top 3 tips to help you crush it:

Be prepared:

Do the work ahead of time to make sure your attendees, key message, requests for action, and basic logistics are in line. Ahead of your trip, send a quick note to attendees to make sure they have what they need before you arrive. Make reservations if you need dinners, order the lunches ahead of time, etc.

Take notes:

The meetings you’re going for have been deemed important enough for you to attend in person, so there’s got to be some value in the content. Take notes – jot down facial expressions and reactions, grab the highlights of the content, note any immediate next steps, and make a memo of anything you heard that you need to look deeper into. By taking notes, you’ll likely commit more of the information to memory, and you’ll have something to reference for future meetings.

Follow up:

This is a big one that seems to get skipped a lot. I get commended for my follow-up skills, and they are basic at best, which tells me that most people simply don’t do this. Look through your notes, send a big email to everyone who attended with a recap of the meetings, and spell out the action items for each person at the top. It will take you all of 15-20 minutes to do that, but it gives a guide for what’s expected after the meeting that you can reference, and it opens the door for the conversations to continue. Plus, like I said, it does make you stand out.

Happy Travels!

Hannah