Meetings are an essential part of business, and while they hold importance, they can also be one of the company’s biggest drains on time, resources, and productivity. This has become more prevalent since the onset of remote working and people having to meet virtually rather than at a specified location.
Suppose this sounds familiar: making your meetings count and avoiding them becoming somewhat of a bore for others and a chore for you to arrange. In that case, you need to think strategically to get the most from your sessions without impacting your working day.
Can It Be an Email?
While this is a popular meme and phrase touted across social media, you have to ask yourself if what you want to discuss needs to be a meeting. Can the information be relayed some other way? Can you send a company-wide email? Host a group call, video chat with specific parties, etc. If there is another way to get the message out, use this before hosting a meeting.
Define The Purpose
Unproductive meetings can cost big companies around $100 million per year in wasted time and resources. This is a lot of money for a group of people to sit in a room doing nothing predictive at all. Before you arrange the meeting, have a clear and defined purpose for it. Why are you pulling everyone together? What will you discuss, and what are your goals? Never just hold a meeting to share information; this can be done in other ways; the same goes for catching up on where everyone is; this can be done via Slack and so on. Ensure you have a legitimate reason for the meeting before going ahead.
Set An Agenda
You need to have a strict agenda that you can adhere to help you keep things flowing and not waste too much time. Share this with attendees prior to the meeting starting so everyone knows what to expect and what the plan is.
Set A Mutually Beneficial Meeting Place
It could be your office if you’re holding internal meetings to reduce commute times. If you are wooing new clients or you need to be on neutral ground, finding a meeting place a short drive from where you are is preferable. The last thing you want is for people to be wasting too much of their commuting, especially if it’s outside of office hours or a weekend, for example.
Choose the Right People
Too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak, can derail your plans for your meeting entirely. You need to be selective with whom you invite to the meeting. Invite the key decision-makers or those you need to talk to directly to get answers; the more people you have around, the less productive you will be.
Avoid inviting people to make up the numbers and ensure they can decline if they can prove it’s not essential to their job role or they have something more pressing to attend to. You don’t want people there for the sake of it.
Clear and Concise
Avoid confusing people with industry jargon and letting them know what is happening. The same goes for telling elaborate tales for dramatics. You want to keep things clear and concise and ensure that everyone is following along at all times. Avoid buzzwords and straying off-topic in meetings. Get to the point, use clear language, and ask for feedback regularly to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
