5 Ways to Change Your Business Meetings from Bland to Brilliant

Top executives spend thousands of hours each year dealing with emails and unproductive meetings and the loss trickles down throughout the organization. Lost time isn’t just spent in the meetings themselves. The process of preparing and winding down from meetings cuts into productivity as well, with employees at all levels losing valuable work time each week.

However, meetings are an essential part of doing business. Despite the many collaborative tools available, face-to-face meetings remain the most efficient way to exchange ideas quickly. Holding the attention of today’s tech-distracted, fast-paced workers can present numerous challenges, especially if those employees are already time challenged. It’s important that your meetings be efficient and interesting or you may be wasting everyone’s time.

When you conduct business meetings exactly the way they have always been done, the result is comfortable and many times forgettable. Energize your meetings by confounding expectations with the following tactics, exercises, and suggestions.

Make It Interactive.

Business meetings are often unproductive because they are process-driven and chaired by dominating speakers.

If your meetings consist of one person speaking at length to a roomful of people, your employees likely are only capturing a percentage of what’s being said. Instead of spending a half an hour reviewing the plan for your upcoming project, for instance, you could invite your employees to participate in the planning process during a brainstorming project.

However, business meetings can be designed to require participation from employees through proper preparation. Consider sending out the meeting agenda a week ahead of time with assignments and invitations for employees to participate. Ask employees to brainstorm ideas for a current business problem. Avoid generally asking for participating, but instead set measurable expectations, such as informing every employee that they will be called upon to contribute two or three ideas.

If your employees feel as though they are taking part in the meeting, they’ll be more likely to remain alert and interested.

Break the routine, change the venue.

One reason that employees show up to meetings already bored is because they expect routine and monotony: the culprit may be the configuration of the venue itself. It’s possible that your surroundings aren’t conducive to developing new ideas or having profitable discussions, and it may be time to make some changes to your meeting settings.

Creating a setting for inspiration and creativity is not as hard as it sounds. A few simple changes can really make a big difference.

The next time a meeting is scheduled, surprise employees with a special “field trip” to a fun location. Your employees will likely enjoy the outing and when you do get back into the conference room, they will have a greater sense of camaraderie as well as some great stories to tell.

By finding new ways to make your meetings interesting and fun, you’ll keep employees’ attention and get great ideas from your team.

Move your business to a different venue, instead of the usual conference room setting make it a business luncheon or a brunch outside the company’s location. Take them out of their daily routine, out of that room with artificial light.

Change your presentation style, do something different at the beginning of each meeting.

Start off with an inspirational quote or story, or a passage from a bestselling business book or share with them a video. It could be something funny or inspirational.

If you’ve used PowerPoint for every meeting, it may be time to shake things up. Instead of slides, hand out paper notes instead.

Visual aids are a great way to engage your meeting participants, giving them something interesting to look at. However, PowerPoint slides have become so ingrained in work meetings, employees sometimes get slide fatigue. Consider using other presentation apps to give your slides a kick, but don’t overdo it. Too many graphics and sound effects can turn your meeting into a circus.

Keep it positive.

Don’t let the meeting digress into a complaint session. Set the standard of positivity at your first meeting and make it a rule for all meetings. If there is a problem, look at solving it with a team approach, concentrating on the next step of solving it rather than complaining about the problem itself.

Keep it short.

Nobody likes a long meeting, so keep it short and positive. If you need to discuss points further, schedule another meeting. People won’t dread short meetings that accomplish everyone’s goals.

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