It’s shocking that not all meeting leaders or speakers remember to share the material afterwards. Forgetting to do this does even more damage than its impact on the ability of attendees to access the materials from that one meeting – it damages their trust in you and ultimately saps energy from your company culture. Here is a simple way to avoid all that:
Share materials before the meeting. Even if your materials aren’t ready ahead of time, create a folder where you will place the meeting materials. Share a link to that folder as part of the meeting invitation. If you have people dialing in, also provide the link online as part of the meeting. The folder doesn’t actually need to contain anything when you send out the invitation (unless you want people to review things in advance).
If you’re sharing the materials to a screen as part of your meeting, take a moment to show the audience how to find the materials. It will increase their comfort with your collaboration practices, and it will also build their trust. The best part is that if you need to add new materials or revisions to what you’ve shared in the meeting, you can dump them into the same folder and your attendees will see them when they come back.
But I don’t have time to do all that extra preparation! Sorry: if you don’t have time to prepare for a meeting, you shouldn’t be calling a meeting. Anyway, if you circulate the materials before the meeting, you’ll save time afterwards. What am I missing?
This even works in webinars Share a link to a landing page in an email before the webinar where you’ll post the slides and other goodies later. At the beginning of the webinar, in the chat, include the link. Tell the attendees where they will be able to find the slides. And then you can spend ZERO TIME in the webinar answering the question, “Will you be sharing the slides afterwards?”
Someone will always ask, but you don’t have to answer. It’s time to stop the madness.
But if I share the materials ahead of time, no one will attend the webinar! Then you should make it more interesting! I always attend online sessions led by Jay Schwedelson or Ryan Reisert because I know I’ll get information I can use right away. Anyway, so what if people don’t attend the session, if they engage with your content later? Oh, they didn’t do that either? Then make it more compelling.
