What is the ultimate goal of every business, regardless of whether it has 5 or 5,000 employees? Well, that’s simple — the goal is to get things done. How do we get things done? With dedication, motivation and smooth workflow. To achieve that, parties have to establish a strong flow of communication where problems are discussed and solved. That’s why organizations run regular business meetings.
When employees hear the word “meeting,” they often fall in despair and want to get it over with as soon as possible, so that they can go back to their daily tasks and responsibilities. Even though meetings are absolutely necessary, they have earned the reputation of being the most “tedious” and “time-consuming” part of the work day. That’s because some meetings just don’t work and end up not just wasting everyone’s time and energy but also not fulfilling their purpose.
Employees can, of course, communicate with each other in various, non-formal ways. However, in some cases the decisions made during those discussions can get lost in translation and someone always ends up uninformed and with tons of questions.
To sum things up, meetings are absolutely crucial for your company. What’s even more crucial, though, is learning how to run efficient and productive meetings. It’s not as easy as it sounds, trust me. However, with the right tips and tricks you can totally transform your next boring meeting into a fruitful, straightforward and efficient event.
In this article, I will outline 10 different ways to make your meeting more effective. Stay tuned and take notes!
- Define the Purpose of the meeting
This is a given. Yet, some meetings leave us with questions like “Why?” and “What for?” Remember, a meeting will only be productive and effective if there’s a purpose behind it.
If you’re the one calling for it, there surely must be a reason behind it. What happened? Was there a crisis at your company? Are two or more employees in a dispute? Is there a new project that requires on-boarding? Are you dissatisfied with certain task outcomes and want to discuss improvements?
It’s that simple — there should be a purpose and if there’s one, there will be an outcome. Outcome is what we want as it gives us clarity, defines our responsibilities and helps us move forward with success.
2. Use meeting minutes
Many companies use business meeting agenda templates or the so-called meeting minutes to structure the discussion points and save time. I am a huge fan of meeting minutes and highly advise any company to utilize them, if they haven’t done it yet.
Often, organizations designate a secretary to keep a written transcript of what was talked about during a meeting, including attendees, objectives, schedule, responsibilities, votes, final remarks, etc. When you have a template, this whole process becomes ten times easier.
With meeting minutes any verbal discussion or assignment is turned into an action plan. There’s also the transparency factor — if it’s on the meeting minutes, it’s happening and everyone knows or will know about it.
Also, last but not least, let’s not forget about the team members who can’t attend a scheduled meeting for one reason or another. If you have meeting minutes, which are basically a record of what was discussed, you can quickly send it to the absentee and keep him/her in the loop.
3. Prepare for the meeting
You haven’t called on a meeting to discuss the weather and talk about Taylor Swift’s latest album, right? If not, come prepared. Whether you’re going to be the one leading it, or you’re one of the team members invited to the meeting, preparation is key. For example, prepare numbers, statistics, names, screenshots, reviews and more, if needed, to achieve better results. A visual representation of what you’re talking about is much better than shouting out a couple of sentences in the middle of a heated discussion.
4. Be inclusive or exclusive?
When it comes to deciding on the list of attendees, you have to ask yourself what’s the type of the meeting and whether inviting as many people as possible won’t feel like going to a bar on a Friday night.
At least 80% of people will agree that meetings should be exclusive. This means that you should only invite those team members who are relevant to the issues that will be discussed. Remind yourself of the objective and think who will need by your side to help you achieve the goal of the meeting. If there are too many people in a meeting that are simply not 100% essential to the completion of the end goal, you will, on your own, realize that that meeting won’t be as effective as you wanted it to be.
5. Define the best time to conduct a meeting
You want to conduct a business meeting with your team members tomorrow and you already came up with the list of attendees. So far so good. Now, you have to decide on a time and schedule it. You’re thinking 1:00pm, right after lunch. Oh, and tomorrow is Friday! Well, maybe you should think twice before scheduling that meeting.
According to a study, conducted by YouCanBookMe, the best time to have an effective business meeting is on Tuesdays, at 2:30pm. It’s not too late in the week, it’s not too early in the morning and it’s not right before or after lunch, making it absolutely perfect.
Avoid scheduling meetings on Mondays and Fridays and right after lunchtime. Give your team members some quality time to recharge their batteries. We all get a little lethargic right after a decent lunch and this truly affects our productivity. After 2:00pm everyone’s energy levels are usually back to normal.
6. Collect opinions from everyone
You surely don’t want your business meeting to turn into a passionate discussion between two people with strong opinions and characters and ten listeners, nodding heads and looking at the clock on the wall.
You have to come up with a system that will allow everyone’s voice to be heard. You can even use the help of many meeting management platforms that can spice things up a little bit and make everything much more interactive and interesting. If you don’t want to, you can always use the whiteboard behind you to illustrate the discussion points, pros/cons and votes. You can also collect votes and ask everyone to write down their thoughts at the end of the meeting on a project survey, for example.
7. No smartphones/tablet policy
Drastic but sometimes absolutely necessary. You have to make sure that everyone is focused and participates actively in the conversation. Many companies ask team members to leave their smartphones aside while attending a meeting. When the meeting requires a lot of attendees, this policy is a must. You can’t point fingers and disturb your line of thought just because James from row 10 is scrolling through Facebook. However, if this rule is put down on the agenda and you remind of it at the beginning of every meeting, I’m sure people will think twice before taking out their smartphones.
8. Think about sending an email first
Once I saw a picture of an office candle with a sticker on it that read “Smells like a meeting that should’ve been an email” and I thought that was absolutely hilarious. You know what they say — it’s funny because it’s true.
Before scheduling a meeting and going through all the hustle that will follow, ask yourself if you really need it. Verbal communication is, of course, preferable over any written correspondence. However, if the content of the meeting can be summarized into several bullet points and sent as an email, just do it. Don’t spend time reserving conference rooms and waiting for everyone to arrive on time.
9. End the meeting early if possible
It happens rarely but when it does, everyone is thrilled about it. On average, most employees attend 62 meetings per month. Imagine that! What happens if each one of those meetings doesn’t end on time? This will disrupt the whole workday flow.
You’ve already assigned each team member a task and there are deadlines to be met. Make sure the length of the meeting is already determined and announced. Stick to it, no matter what. This way, you will have a focused group of people who won’t be looking at their watches and phones every five minutes.
10. Send a meeting follow-up email to the participants
We are humans. We forget things. It happens in our personal lives and it happens in our professional lives. That’s why, if you’re a meeting moderator, a team leader or a manager, you have to make sure people will remember what was discussed during a meeting, who was assigned to what and what were the deadlines. Send a follow-up note via email.
If you’re using meeting minutes, send them to the team with a kind “thank you” for their participation.
Finally, we have to remember that meetings go together with our daily routine in the business life. You can’t escape them, regardless of whether you think they’re a waste of time or not.
Meetings are a great way to communicate with your team and exchange meaningful ideas about the future of the company. Not just that but they can be quite empowering and further strengthen team spirit and loyalty.
Yes, they can sometimes be dull, lack direction or turn into an endless and meaningless discussion. However, there’s hope. For every problem you can face during or before a business meeting, there’s a solution. I hope I gave you some interesting points to think about before planning your next team meeting.
If you feel like this is not enough and you’re looking for a more permanent solution to your meetings, there’s a great meeting management software I can recommend. It’s called Mombit and it does a lot for you and your team. You can calculate meeting cost, use built-in business minutes, track productivity and assign, attend and facilitate as many meetings as you want. Go ahead and check it out!
