The Top Meeting Pet Peeves that Plague Organizations – Tip #4

The following is the fourth meeting pet peeve in a weekly series of 5.

Pet Peeve #4 – Using PowerPoint When It’s Not Needed

PowerPoint is an essential business tool, but it’s not effective for all meeting types. Unfortunately, many people believe that ALL meetings require the use of PowerPoint. Not true! Typical information sharing meetings require a facilitator asking questions and everyone contributing in round-robin style. Watching someone read PowerPoint slides is not how these meetings should run. After all, if people simply needed to read pages of text, you could just send them the file and skip the meeting completely.

Of course, if your informational meeting needs more of people’s senses involved, then use PowerPoint to add that visual component. Likewise, if you’re combining everyone’s data and showing it in chart or graph form, PowerPoint is great. But don’t use PowerPoint just for the sake of it. Know why you’re using it, and then do it right.