As a business owner, your time is a limited resource.
Therefore, you want to protect your time as much as possible.
One way to squander your valuable minutes (and possibly hours) is in pointless meetings.
Productive meetings are great – but, more often than not, a poorly executed meeting is a big waste of time and therefore a drain on your company’s resources.
Here are a few tricks to ensure your meeting is productive…
1. Make sure you really need a meeting.
There’s s popular joke that asks, “Could this hour-long meeting have been replaced with a 2-minute email?”
While that’s meant to be funny, there’s an underlying hard truth here.
Don’t just have meetings for the sake of having them.
Really question if a well-crafted email, or smartly used Google document or spreadsheet would suffice.
2. Manage Your Time More Effectively.
While it’s nice to see your colleagues in person from time to time — after all, it helps build rapport — it’s not always practical to do so.
If the meeting attendees aren’t located within the same office space, travelling to and from a meeting site just increases the investment required in the meeting.
We live in a wonderful era of technology. Make use of Skype and Zoom and other similar applications to conduct meetings.
These programs are easy to use, cost-effective (often even free), and they allow you to see and hear each other, as well as share documents and live screen presentations, so you really don’t miss out on anything from the meeting experience.
3. No brainstorming allowed.
My least favorite type of meeting is the “brainstorming” meeting.
Telling your colleagues they are attending a brainstorming session is giving them license to come unprepared, because all the thinking and work will be done in the meeting.
This is a huge mistake and mismanagement of everyone’s time.
Instead, set a clear agenda of what is meant to covered in the meeting.
If it’s ideas you’re looking for, ask each attendee to come prepared with 3 great ideas and tell them they will get a fixed amount of time to present these ideas.
4. Don’t invite everyone to the meeting.
One of the worst mistakes you can make when conducting a meeting is to invite too many people to attend.
Because they are in attendance, people might feel obligated to pitch in even though they don’t have anything relevant to say.
Or, they’ll feel worn out and flustered by being in a meeting where they have nothing of value to contribute, thus draining their time, focus, and energy when they could be serving the company elsewhere, in a more meaningful way.
Team leaders can delegate the task of attending the meeting on their behalf to one person. That one person can attend the meeting and share the ideas of the collective team. Then, they can share the outcome of the meeting with the team in a time-efficient email.
5. Take minutes during the meeting.
It makes no sense for everyone to take the same notes during a meeting — it’s redundant.
Assign this task to someone who is good at recording minutes, and get them to summarize the meeting in an email that can be sent out to everyone who was in attendance, as well as those who were not in attendance.
By doing this, as a bonus, people can pay more attention to what’s going on, and be more present in the meeting, as opposed to worrying if they are taking good notes.
6. No eating or drinking coffee allowed during the meeting.
You might think combining the meeting with breakfast or lunch is an efficient use of time, but in reality, it usually just makes the meeting needlessly longer.
Unless you’re serving food during a presentation, or during a needed break, the distraction of food and drink will just prolong things.
Let your team enjoy their breakfast or lunch on their own terms and, when it’s time for a meeting, allow them to focus on the task at hand.
7. Get Up, Out of Your Seats
Having a “standing” meeting is a great way to make sure people don’t get too comfortable and leisurely during the meeting.
You might be surprised at how many decisions and clarifications can happen in 15 minutes, when people are anxious to get back to their desks and coffee.
Plus, evidence suggests that people are livelier, more creative, and more motivated when they are standing, as opposed to sitting.
Think about it – you can’t fall asleep during a meeting if you’re standing!
Making everyone stand during a brief meeting will create a sense of urgency and get you more results in less time.
8. Set a hard start time and end time beforehand
Everyone who is attending the meeting should be given a clear start AND end time in advance.
Be very strict about this.
They should also know what’s going to be covered, and what they need to bring to the table.
Setting the agenda beforehand in this manner will ensure that your meeting launches out of the gates right away, and never loses momentum until all the objectives are met.
9. Be consistent.
In order for your meetings to run efficiently time and time again, you need to build a reputation as someone who doesn’t like to mess around in meetings.
You need to be taken seriously when you want everyone to show up at a certain time, contribute in a meaningful way, and leave on schedule with everything resolved.
You do this by being consistent.
Don’t hold pointless meetings. Don’t allow people to be late. Make sure they contribute, and make sure your meetings don’t go off the rails by straying from the well-prepared agenda.
Running meetings in your business is a great way to come to decisions and resolve issues, but when mismanaged, meetings can be a colossal waste of time. Make sure your meetings are run efficiently by holding meetings only when they are truly necessary, eliminate travel time by holding meetings via Skype or Zoom, set a clear agenda as opposed to having a meeting to brainstorm or some other vague notion, only invite people to attend who are truly necessary, assign one person to take minutes and have them share their notes with everyone, do not allow food or drink in the meeting, make everyone stand during the meeting, have a hard start and end time, and be consistent with your rules every time you hold a meeting.
Discover the secret to creating your power brand. Watch this Free Video Series.