How to Deal with Unproductive Business Meetings?

Business meetings are often considered as an effective way to bring employees together to discuss pertinent issues and come up with new ideas. Business meetings are also effective in building team rapport and business relationships. But, not every meeting ends up with satisfactory results. Some are disappointingly a waste of time. Here are some food for your thought.
- Unproductive meetings cost companies more than $37 billion annually
- Almost 37% of employee just spend their time on meetings
- 91% of people daydream during meetings.
With unproductive meetings leading to the loss of productivity, businesses are bound to look for cures. Here’re the five major conditions which turn a planned meeting into a disengaged affair.
Cure: Create a meeting agenda and share it in advance with every participant
Before you set expectations from participants of a meeting, you need to give them a chance to prepare beforehand. With a clearly-defined meeting agenda shared in advance, participants can make note of things on which they require to provide input on. When participants have gathered their thoughts in advance, conversation during the meeting is likely to be streamlined.
- Extending a Meeting Just to Fill the Time
Cure: Go with the discussion flow, but watch the clock
The priority of any business meeting should be covering every item in the agenda and coming up with better ideas. But, the flow of a meeting gets affected when participants keeping on stretching on certain points just because the clock has not struck the completion time. Rather, you should end the meeting as soon as every item in the agenda is discussed effectively. As soon as the intended purpose of a meeting is solved, let the meeting dissolve. Participants are likely to feel elated about getting few minutes of respite before heading on to the next scheduled task.
- Inviting Too Many People in One Go
Cure: Keep your list crisp by inviting only those who need to be in
By inviting too many participants without considering whether they really need to be in the meeting, you only end up creating a situation of chaos. Also, you may face problem in finding the right meeting room for a large number of participants, leading to their discomfort. Remember, by inviting someone for a meeting, you are asking for his/her time. Make sure, you don’t end up wasting their valuable time by inviting them to a meeting which is not directly associated with them.
Cure: Ask people to leave their mobile devices unattended during the meeting, unless it’s really important
When you are organizing a meeting, you have every right to set the rules. A meeting where participants involve in the discussion at hand with undivided attention, the results are likely to be more productive. So, why let your participants indulge in multitasking through their mobile devices. Set such rules which prevent participants from attending unnecessary phone calls or replying to messages during meetings.
- Lacking Tools of the Trade
Cure: Look for video conferencing solutions and other UC (Unified Collaboration) tools
Participants are likely to feel disengaged during audio meetings with their clients and other employees. Audio meetings often lack the required features for contact sharing and also miss out on the impact of face-to-face conversation. Here comes videoconferencing software and other unified communications tools, which can bring participants together on a virtual platform to interact efficiently.
You can now interact face-to-face with your colleague, even when they are sitting in an airport lounge. There is no reason for everyone to be present in one room to engage in an effective conversations. By taking care of the above-mentioned considerations and by using the latest videoconferencing tools, even geographical barriers can look trivial.
Originally published at www.techpillar.com.