IT meetings can be very stressful. Many IT teams are made up of members from all over the world, and the only language that everyone can communicate in common is in English. Your team may have members from England, French, Austria or even the Czech Republic.
IT meetings in English
Holding an IT meeting is similar to other types of business meetings. You call a meeting when there are decisions to be made that will affect many people and you need input from your team in order to implement what has been accomplished during the meeting. One problem that you may find when you have members who don’t speak English as their native language is that English terms might need to be defined ahead of time. It might be a good idea to include a glossary of difficult to understand English terms at the bottom of the agenda.
Our advice for a successful meeting in English
1.In order to have a successful meeting, you need to have an agenda, which has to be distributed before the meeting. This is important if you need to have the participants prepare information and reports to present at the meeting.
2. Make sure that your agenda is organized, and that you start and end on time.
3. Make sure that you cover all your topics, and leave time at the end for questions.
4. Make sure that you have someone take minutes with all the important points that were covered as well as decisions that were made and who is going to be responsible for implementation.
5. As with all meetings, if someone is late, don’t waste everyone’s time by recapping all the topics that were already covered, but instead meet with the person later.
Do you work in IT? How do you handle your IT meetings? Are they in English? What challenges do you face?
