7 tips for more effective meetings

If you’re reading this it means that you have the same problems that I had — a lot of wasting-time meetings. No matter if you’re a Scrum Master, Tester, Developer, Designer, no matter if you’re working in Human Resources, Marketing or any other department — you probably have some meetings. Unfortunately every meeting which is not organised properly can potentially waste time of every single person in the room — even if they don’t know that. I’ve learned a lot from that kind of meetings and these are my recommendations for having effective ones.

1. Describe the goal

The goal has to be clear and well described. Everyone should know exactly why they’ve got an invitation and what is the purpose. During the meeting we’ll be able to follow the goal and — what’s important — we’ll have kind of a reference or a metrics if what we’re discussing make sense and we’re solving the problem or it’s just talking.

2. Prepare the agenda

Prepare it before the meeting and share it. Having a goal is one thing but it’s nice to know how we want to achieve it. What exactly we’ll be discussing? How the meeting will look like? Of course we can explain everything during the meeting, but wouldn’t be wasting a time? Let’s imagine these two scenarios:

• We’re discussing the agenda right after the meeting is started. People will understand the structure of the meeting and what exactly we’re gonna discuss. There will be some questions, some doubts, some changes. After everything is clear, we can start solving the problem.
• The agenda is presented couple days before the meeting. Everyone understand the context. There will be also some questions and doubts, but they will be discussed before the meeting. People go to the meeting focused and with prepared ideas.

The second one is much more attractive to me. And much more effective.

3. Set rules of the meeting

If it’s just a one meeting probably it’s not necessary. However if we’re gonna meet every week for a couple of weeks it’s nice to have kind of a rules of the meeting — especially if we’re in the room with that group of people for the first time. Why? Because each one of us can have different feelings about how this meeting should go. About what we should do and what we shouldn’t. There is no point in assuming that everyone will know this. It will take from 5 to 10 minutes to set a rules together, like: we’re not late, we’re not using phones, we’re not eating — so on and so forth. Doing it together is important. Thanks to that we’ll know what people don’t like during the meetings and then there is a chance to eliminate potentially frustrations.

4. Write notes

It is very helpful to write a well structured notes. The best notes are the ones which correspond to the agenda. In the meeting we’ll go through the agenda point by point and for each one we should write down all of the things which are most important: decisions, problems, context and so on. It’s a good idea to show them during the meeting and writing them in front of the people. Everyone will stay on the same page and there will be no misunderstandings of what was said. Everything will be clear and transparent. If you’re late, you can read exactly what was going on and being active without any unneeded disruptions. Also if someone couldn’t go, there is just one source of truth of what was discussed.

5. Choose a moderator

In every meeting there has to be some moderator. One person which will make sure that we’re solving the problem, following the agenda and respecting the rules. The person should also write notes. You can imagine that being a moderator is very focus-consuming so if the same person will perform this function in every meeting, we’ll lose its good ideas — that’s why we have to rotate it. In the next meeting it should be someone else. Thanks to that everyone will be focused and engaged.

6. Plan next actions

This is one of the most important point — plan next actions. If we’re gonna have a meeting in the same group next week we should take some actions till that. If we need something for the next meeting, like some decision of our superior or more information about some issue — one of us should do this. The moderator has to write the action down and assign someone to it, some volunteer. We have to go forward to achieve the goal. If we have couple of people in the room, each one of them should be engaged. One person doesn’t have enough time to do everything on its own. Especially if it’s some additional stuff. If we‘re working together, we’ll achieve the goal much faster and results from meeting to meeting will be more visible.

7. Review actions

If we set the actions in the previous meeting, in the next one we should verify them. This should be one of the agenda point — what was done in terms of the planned actions. We’ll stay connected of what’s going on and we’ll be able to help someone if there were some issues. Based on the completed ones we can plan next actions.

Wrap up

I hope that these tips will help you to organize effective meetings. If you think they are useful, don’t forget to clap!