How to make large meetings welcoming

Large meetings require more work to create a welcoming environment. Here are some additional steps you can take to make sure people feel welcome:

Put leaders in charge of the welcome. At a major hospital, the senior leadership team welcomed people as they entered the meeting venue and also staffed the registration table. You can imagine everyone’s surprise as the CEO shook people’s hands and handed out name badges and meeting materials. This group of leaders wanted to make a statement about how they saw their role, and they did so from the very beginning of the meeting.

Start with a meal. Breaking bread is one of the oldest forms of helping people feel welcome. Beginning your meeting with a meal gives folks a chance to connect with each other prior to the start of the work.

Provide topnotch logistics—first impressions count. When the meeting looks organized and when all the materials are ready and waiting so that participants can do their work,people begin to relax. The fact that people cared enough to prepare the meeting so that productive work can occur helps people feel welcome.

If you are conducting a large-group meeting where people will be in a variety of discussion groups, a simple guide that helps people know their seating assignment for each discussion goes a long way to helping them feel comfortable.

Accommodate different languages. We were working with a manufacturing plant where people spoke many languages. The leaders wanted to include everyone in the process to improve productivity but were concerned that non-English speakers would be unable to contribute. We weren’t sure how to handle this problem, so we asked people who were not native speakers what to do.

They came up with a unique solution: have the employees invite a family member or friend with good English skills to be a translator during the process and provide the translators with the meeting materials ahead of time so they could prepare for the workshop. The result was that everyone felt welcome and was able to contribute to improving the organization.