How You Can Make Meetings More Productive to Achieve Success
Meetings across many businesses are essential to update staff with valuable insights and highlight changes or important news. However, more often than not, they can bring chaos with people talking over one another, ideas getting lost, staff feeling uncomfortable or scared to share what they think and everyone feeling exhausted with too many meetings that they can’t get actual work done. In fact, the average worker can spend about two days in a week in meetings and checking through their emails!
So, how can businesses change this and make meetings more productive by having fewer meetings and getting the most out of one? Explore how you can make meetings more productive to achieve success and give them purpose and direction to avoid wasting time.
Outline the purpose of the meeting
Before you even book your meeting with the relevant staff members, it is important to decide what the purpose of the meeting is. Consider what you need to discuss and if it’s necessary for your staff. If the purpose is only to share information with your team, could this be done in writing in the form of a PowerPoint or a report? If you need to make a key decision with certain members of staff, could you just have a quick conversation with those who it concerns rather than a whole meeting? If you want feedback, you could do an online poll or a ballot instead. Everything really doesn’t have to be a meeting, especially just to share information that can be shared in other ways.
Set a meeting agenda
Once you’ve decided if a meeting needs to go ahead, you need to make an agenda to plan what has to be covered in each meeting and estimate how long it will take. Creating an agenda helps you to stay on topic throughout the meeting and stick to the timings so you don’t spend more time than needed. Make sure to share the agenda with your team before the meeting so attendees know what will happen and can prepare for it. Doing this eliminates anyone being blindsided in a meeting and reduces being uncomfortable with sharing ideas as they can plan responses, making the meeting go quicker and more enjoyable.
Have a leader
Before the meeting starts, appoint a leader for it. Choose someone who is most knowledgeable about the topic and can confidently lead the meeting to success. Make sure to change the leader for each meeting to reduce pressure on one individual and allow everyone to experience leadership. Having a leader allows every attendee to share their ideas with their voices being heard while staying on topic, reducing the chaos of talking over one another and straying from what needs to be discussed.
Set priorities & goals
For every meeting you have you need to allow staff to set their priorities. This means that you need to let employees decline meeting invitations if they feel like it’s not productive for them or they aren’t needed. When they decline, let them know to show how the meeting isn’t relevant to them. It’s always best to have a small number of people needed in a meeting rather than just adding people for the sake of making numbers up.
Once you have the number of people attending, create goals that you want out of the meeting and share these. This can be added to the agenda or be discussed and decided upon as a team before the meeting starts. Have a clear objective, such as a learning opportunity, and clear takeaways after the meeting. Note down the action needed for yourself and the rest of the team and the deadlines for when the action needs to be completed.
Consider hosting outside of the workplace
Many times, large meetings can feel stagnant, stuffy, boring and pointless, leaving staff coming away confused and unhappy. This can be due to the number of meetings they are having in the workplace or a lack of space in the meeting rooms provided at the workplace. Sometimes, it may be best to get out of the same old work environment by booking a conference room for hire in a new and motivating space. This can boost productivity significantly because a change of scenery can do wonders for motivation, participation and morale!
Invite the right people
No matter what meeting you are holding, it is vital to ensure that you invite the right people to specific meetings. Think carefully about who the topic will affect most, and if you’re not sure, ask employees for their advice. You need to have the people who will benefit the most from the meeting to make it successful. Only have the people it directly affects or involves and those who may need to know about it can have an update via email to make them aware of the situation. You could also record the meeting with the relevant people to share with the rest of the team at a later date to keep them updated. You could even invite more people to share the reason for the meeting and then let people who aren’t needed for deeper discussion out early to focus on tasks.
Encourage staff to share ideas and speak up
During the majority of meetings, the same people always speak and share their ideas which can drown out everyone else’s views and opinions. This is a missed opportunity for collating unique and fresh ideas from different perspectives as you always get the same view from the same people.
A successful meeting provides a comfortable and safe space to ask questions, raise concerns, challenge ideas and have a variety of solutions. To ensure that every member of staff is heard in meetings, set ground rules that everyone can agree on to allow those who sit back and can’t get a word in to speak up. It could be as simple as having an item to pass around and only the person holding it can speak or eliminate judgement to respect diverse communication habits. Remember it’s best to challenge ideas, not people!
Use this advice to make your meetings much more productive and achieve success from them, reducing wasting anybody’s time and ensuring everyone gets the most out of every meeting. Always plan ahead to keep the meeting on track and effectively communicate and share ideas with employees, making sure everyone’s on the same page so that meetings are enjoyable and comfortable.
