Meeting Themes

A meeting theme should be such that it makes the business meeting much more effective and result oriented. They should be so interesting that they set the right mood for the attendees and also help them understand the meeting agenda. Below are some tips on how to come up with the perfect and the most appropriate themes..

Tips on Selecting Meeting Themes

• The first thing that you should do is to come up with a meeting agenda and then accordingly choose a theme that will help in making this agenda more clear to the attendees.
• The next thing that you should do is to come up with themes, which you think your employees will like.
• Relate them with any upcoming day/festival/event, such as Valentine's day, Christmas or academy awards.
• The theme selected should be short and memorable. Also, it should be fun, so that the employees do not feel bored.
• It should not offend any body's sensibilities in any way, i.e. it should not be sexist or racist in any way.

Tips on Incorporating the Theme into the Meeting

• After you have zeroed in on a particular theme, the first thing that you should do is to look out for ways in which you can relate both the theme as well as the meeting's agenda. For example, you can ask the speakers to prepare their speeches in relation to the theme.
• Come up with a logo for meeting which is inspired by the theme. Then use this logo on the mugs, screen savers, pens, t-shirts and all other promotional things and literature for the meeting.
• While choosing prizes, gifts, certificates to be given away during the meeting, make sure that they revolve around the theme in some way.
• During the meeting, to lighten the atmosphere, include some songs or short plays or role-plays, that depict the theme.
• Decorations and refreshments that you finally decide for the meeting, should be planned, keeping the theme in mind too.

Corporate Theme Ideas

• A theme which is extremely popular these days, especially for crucial business meetings, is "Relaxation". Such meetings are usually planned outside office, where people can simply relax and discuss important issues. With this theme, beverages such as green tea and healthy foods such as fruit salads are served.
• If it is a sales meeting that is being planned, then the theme should be such that it fills the meeting with energy. Having a party atmosphere where balloons are used for decoration and lip smacking foods such as chicken wings or cutlets are served along with energy drinks, will be ideal for sales meetings.
• Having an Olympics theme is another idea which can be used for sales meetings, especially if you want to motivate your sales people for bringing in more business. For decoration, flags of different countries should be put around the meeting room. Only sports or energy drinks along with some snacks should be served. If the sales people have to be given incentives or gifts for meeting targets, medals should be given along with these. Make three categories of medals, namely gold, silver and bronze, just like in sports, and have your achievers stand on three-storied podium, for fun.
• Another theme that you can apply for a meeting on teamwork, is clock theme. Just like the different parts of a clock work together to tell the right time, similarly people in the organization should work together to achieve organizational goals. For this, walls of the meeting room should be decorated with different wall clocks. During presentations and speeches, clock terminology should be made use of. The employees can even be gifted individual clocks at the end of the meeting as a reminder of the importance of working in teams.

I hope the above mentioned ideas will be helpful to you, when you are choosing themes for your forthcoming office meetings. Best of luck!