9 Ways to Boost Productivity of Your Meetings
In modern work life, people can hardly imagine their average working day without any type of meeting. Since teamwork has become an essential part of our life, constant communication and interaction are necessary for successful collaboration with colleagues.
However, not every meeting leads to positive results. On the contrary, some of them can be a total loss of work hours. If you want your meetings to be positive and constructive, then this article is for you!
Magnitude of the Disaster
According to the Korn Ferry consulting company, 51% of employees (out of 1945 professional’s surveyed) consider that meetings take too much time and distract them from truly important work.
Their research has also found out that:
- 6% of employees spend 10+ hours per week on unproductive meetings and calls.
- 15% of them spend 5–10 hours on meetings/calls.
- 34% say meetings take between 2–5 hours.
- Another 34% spend only 1–2 hours per week on their discussions with colleagues.
Research by Verizon Conferencing has proven, that disturbingly 91% of meeting attendees tend to daydream during meetings. We can see that for individuals, meetings may be time-consuming and ineffective and for a businesses, they become costly if we calculate the amount of time wasted by employees.
How to Make Your Meetings Productive
The above-mentioned statistics doesn’t give the best impression of the concept of meetings. However, teams can’t perform well without them and the main culprit of low productivity is poor organisation.
So, here are 9 great tips to make your meetings more organised and more productive than ever! And they really do work! ;)
1. Set a purpose
How many times in your daily working life, have you thought: Why am I attending this meeting? Some employees even joke that they take part in meetings to discuss other meetings. Obviously, this attitude has to change.
Everyone should have a clear understanding of the purpose of every meeting and have this question answered: Why are we here?
So, if you are a meeting organiser, communicate transparently the purpose and main objectives of the meeting to every attendee. People will be set up to resolve the issue, not to discuss unnecessary assumptions.
Here are a few examples of meeting purposes:
- To generate ideas for new product features.
- To discuss the conditions of partnerships.
- To deal with newly found troubles.
- To share important information.
- Follow-up discussions of new tasks.
What is even more essential, is to focus only on one purpose at a time and not to fall into habits of discussing other topics.
2. List attendees
Don’t just list people who will take part in the discussion, define their roles and responsibilities. Make sure that everyone knows what they are expected to present and how they should contribute to a meeting.
Chaos raises when many disengaged people take part in meetings. Those colleagues are wasting their time, as they are not getting any important information and don’t take active part in discussions.
Furthermore, the lesser people that take part, the faster you find the middle ground and get results. It’s hard to find a compromise if more than 10 people are involved.
Based on the list of attendees, start creating an agenda for your meeting.
3. Define an agenda
Predefined agenda’s will prevent attendees from distractions and switches to off-topic discussions. Having an agenda keeps all participants interested and on track.
Once created, your meeting agenda should be shared with team members beforehand, so that everyone can prepare their speech and questions in advance. Share only necessary information to make sure, that you’ll reach your common goal quicker.
4. Try to make it short
The shorter the meeting is, the more focused participants stay. Long discussions result in fatigue and attract additional distractions.
The ideal meeting length is between 10 and 30 minutes. The reason is human ability to deeply focus on something:
- 91% of people are focused during the first 5–15 minutes of a meeting.
- 84% are highly productive at 15–30-minutes meetings.
- 73% can stay active during next 30–45 minutes.
- Only 64% stay focused after the 45th minute onwards.
If you want to get the most of your discussions, make them no longer than 15 minutes.
5. Involve brainstorming
Generating ideas, as any other brain activity, wakes people up and helps them stay focused and interested in the topic. People become engaged and feel that their ideas are necessary for the company.
Also, colleagues from different departments and teams have various sets of skills, which can help to solve complex business issues together.
Dedicate 5 to 10 minutes for brainstorming ideas to keep people ‘active’ during the whole meeting.
6. Use visuals
Prepare short presentations instead of telling teammates long stories. Define the main milestones of your meeting and find a relevant image for each of them. This will engage members in the discussion and switch their focus from rational memories to emotional ones. They will remember what is discussed easily.
Don’t limit yourself to images — simple schemes, spreadsheets, graphs, videos, and infographics will be super helpful.
Don’t forget to share visual materials after the meeting so that everyone can look through them anytime and remind themselves of the discussions held.
7. Keep an eye on time limits
Time = Money. Setting strict limits keeps you from wasting time on unimportant issues and facing financial losses. Set the agenda correctly, so that attendees don’t feel rushed at the end of the discussion. Plan carefully and keep track of time, you dont want a situation when there are 10 minutes left and five people haven’t yet asked their questions.
Remind participants about the time limits, if they exceed them.
8. Follow-up
Once the meeting is over, it’s time to deal with the discussed challenges. Follow up is extremely important if you want everyone to be on the same page.
It can be an e-mail or a shared document with your plans which were agreed upon at the meeting. List the tasks to work on, appoint responsible people, and check in to see whether there is progress in a couple of days.
9. Switch to online
Although this is not our #1 tip, the adaptive quarantine throughout the world is not over yet, switching to online will be useful to plan future discussions.
Technology allows us to save time on city trips and speak to partners, clients or teammates via online tools. Now you don’t need to waste hours to visit a partnering company and talk to their representatives face-to-face. Turn on Zoom or any other conferencing tool and solve issues in real-time, while seeing each other on the screen!
Key Takeaways
These simple tips don’t take much extra time to prepare an ideal meeting. You’ll be surprised by the increased efficiency and engagement.
To summarise all the mentioned above recommendations, we’ve prepared this short to-do list for everyone who wants to conduct the best meetings ever:
- Define one clear purpose of your meeting. This may be a question to answer or an issue to fix.
- Think of who needs to be involved in the discussion. Ideally, choose 4–5 ( and no more than 10) people.
- Create an agenda considering the overall meeting length (up to 30 minutes). Set a time frame for each participant to express their thoughts.
For example, the first 5 minutes are dedicated to the issue description. Then each of the 5 participants has 3 minutes to express their thoughts and ideas. The remaining 10 minutes are spent on finding a solution or a compromise. So, will be simply no time left for lengthy reasoning and the goal of solving the problem, will be achieved for sure.
Share your agenda with all participants. - Prepare visuals in advance. If you’re going to draw schemes on a whiteboard at the meeting, take photos with a phone or a camera, so that you can use them in your follow-ups.
- During the meeting, keep in mind time limits, see if everyone is focused on one topic, summarize the discussion from time to time. Making brief conclusions helps to stay on track with the purpose of the meeting.
- After the meeting reinforce your live or online communication with published and shared documents. Write a summary of the decisions made and actions required. Set responsible people for every point. Get things done! ;)
