Meetings are often important for presenting new ideas, collaborating on projects, and staying up to date with each other. However, they can also be a total waste of time – especially when your attendees are distracted or bored by what’s going on.
How can you make your meetings more engaging and therefore more productive?
Invest in Your Meeting Rooms
You can start by investing in your meeting rooms, assuming you have meetings in person.
Providing better visual technology makes it easier to present key information and allows you to keep all meeting attendees more engaged. For example, superior dry erase technology can encourage meeting leaders to take notes, draw diagrams, and illustrate important principles in an effective way. It’s also a good idea to have functioning, intuitive technology to project videos, graphs, and other visuals seamlessly.
Additionally, it’s good to have an environment conducive to productive discussion. Comfortable chairs, ample desktop space, and other accommodations can help people stay alert and focused. Eliminating distractions with soundproofing or sound resistance can also help.
Cut the Number of Meetings
One of the most important strategies in your arsenal is going to be cutting the number of meetings you hold. It’s very likely that some of your meetings are either unnecessary or somewhat superfluous. For example, do you really need to have an hour-long meeting to discuss a simple memo that you sent out to the entire company? Do you really need a daily huddle meeting when most people know what their responsibilities are?
This doesn’t mean you need to eliminate all meetings, of course. But even if you trim the sheer number of meetings by a conservative amount – like 10 percent – it can make a big impact on your overall productivity.
Keep Things Short and Sweet
Parkinson’s Law is an informal adage that states: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In other words, if you allot a certain amount of time to a task, the task is probably going to take that amount of time.
This holds true especially in the context of meetings. If you schedule a meeting for an hour, it will probably take an hour. If you schedule that same meeting for 30 minutes, meeting participants will likely be motivated to trim the fat and get things done faster.
Accordingly, consider keeping your meetings as short as possible, prescribing the least amount of time necessary to cover the most important material.
Appoint a Director/Leader
Each meeting should have a point person in charge of orchestrating and overseeing the meeting. This way, a clearly responsible party will be in charge of not only organizing the meeting, but also ensuring it meets productivity standards. Consider choosing punctual, organized, efficient people to take on this role.
Set Expectations – and Specific Goals
Before each meeting, you should set expectations and specific goals. How should this meeting flow? What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Without specific goals, any meeting can decline into chaos and counterproductive discussions. With specific goals in place, the meeting has much more focus.
Create a Schedule or Itinerary
Similarly, it’s a good idea to create a schedule or itinerary for each meeting. At the very least, you should have bullet points to establish the ground you’re going to cover. Not only does this help keep the discussion on track, but it also provides a single source of truth so that all meeting participants can recognize when the meeting gets off track. On top of that, it gives attendees the opportunity to be fully prepared for the discussion.
Invite Fewer People
One of the major reasons that meetings are such a widely recognized time waster is that the time wasted is effectively multiplied by the number of people involved in those meetings. A single meeting that wastes 30 minutes of time may not seem that big of a deal, but if you have 10 people involved in that meeting, you’re effectively wasting 5 man-hours of time.
Keep the Discussion on Track
Learn to recognize when the discussion drifts from the original outline – and make sure your meeting leaders are prepared to address the drift and get the group back on track. This may take some practice, especially if your meetings have been disorganized in the past.
Collect Feedback and Iteratively Improve
Finally, consider collecting feedback from all your meeting attendees, either directly after meetings or on some periodic basis. Read and analyze this feedback so that you can continue iteratively improving your approach to meetings.
With these strategies, your meetings can become much more engaging and much more productive. It’s going to take some time to find the right processes and rhythm for your organization, but it’s well worth the effort.