Lesson 10 – Ending a Meeting

Lesson 10 – Ending a Meeting

Welcome to [bad word] s "Business Meetings" course: lesson 10. I'm your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.

In the ninth lesson of "Business Meetings," we learned business vocabulary for ending a topic and planning for the future at formal and informal business meetings. In this tenth and final, or last, lesson, we're going to learn how to end formal and informal meetings.

To begin, let's listen to how Alex ends the formal meeting.

Alex: Shawn, on behalf of all the attendees, I want to thank you for leading such an interesting and productive meeting. I think we have all learned something here today and we have a clear action plan for the next steps.

Our secretary will type up the minutes for today's meeting and we'll distribute them via email for comments. She will also reserve a conference room for next Tuesday's meeting and you'll be apprised of the location as soon as we know it.

Please sign your names on this sheet of paper before leaving today, so that we'll have a record of who was at today's meeting. Our secretary will type up a list with your contact information, and we'll disseminate the participant list to all of you.

For now, I'm adjourning this meeting. We will see each other again next Tuesday. Thank you to all of you for your participation.

Alex begins by saying, "Shawn, on behalf of all the attendees, I want to thank you." The expression, "on the behalf (behalf) of someone" means that you are speaking for another person or another group, that you're expressing someone else's opinion or thoughts. In this case, Alex is thanking Shawn, and he's also expressing the thanks of everyone else in the room – "on behalf of" everyone in the room. If you are a team leader, for example, and your team receives an award, you might say, "On behalf of all my team, I want to thank you for this award." Alex is thanking Shawn for leading an interesting and productive meeting. If something is "productive" (productive) it's effective in getting work done well and quickly. For example, if you type 100 words per minute, you're probably more productive than someone who types 20 words per minute, because you can type more quickly. productive meeting, then, is a meeting where the people are able to get a lot of work done and they feel it was a good use of their time.

Alex says, "I think we have all learned something here today and we have a clear action plan for the next steps." An "action plan" is a plan or a list of what you are going to do that tells you each part of what you need to do. We would say that gives you a "step by step" for doing a project over a certain amount of time. First you do this, then you do that, then you do this; it tells you what you are going to do in the future. That's an "action plan." The action plan for Vision Corporation is to work in two committees, or small groups, on the marketing campaign and on the product changes. "next step" is the next thing that you need to do, or that you will do. Your next step after listening to this lesson, for example, may be to read the transcript over again.

Alex says that the secretary will type up the minutes for today's meeting. In this context, "minutes" are a written detailed description of what was discussed during a meeting. It's used as a record of the meeting to tell you what happened in the meeting, we call those the "minutes," it's always plural. Normally someone is assigned, or asked, to take minutes – note the use of the verb "to take" with this noun, "minutes" – to take minutes for a business meeting, because then, later on, people can remember what happened at the meeting by looking at the minutes. The minutes are not usually a t