Whether you are starting your small business or you’re a manager in a tech company, you probably have to have relatively frequent meetings with other team members. Meetings are the place where you facilitate your work, and so they must run smoothly. If your meetings are unproductive, you could be drastically decreasing your team’s efficiency.
Arrive With a Defined Agenda
Meetings are only as effective as their agendas. When you decide to have a meeting, ensure that you have not only decided on the particular items to talk about but that you also have allotted the amount of time you want to spend on each item.
While you can vary from the specific plan you set, having this agenda for your time usage will help you stay on track and make sure you’re able to cover everything while still keeping the meeting from going longer than planned.
Keep Them Short
Keeping your meetings short is another key aspect of having a successful meeting. When you have long meetings, not only do your team members start to lose interest during the meeting, but they’ll also be less motivated to come prepared and be engaged the next time you hold a meeting.
According to Parkinson’s Law of Meetings, the time you spend in a meeting is inversely proportional to its value. When you remember this law, you’ll have much more productive meetings.
End the Meeting with Action Items
When it comes to having effective meetings, you must remember that a meeting’s main purpose is to help team members figure out what they need to do outside of the meeting. Figuring out those key important takeaways and helping each team member leave with a clear and defined idea of what their specific tasks and goals should be before the next meeting is essential.
As you plan out your agenda, allot at least 5 or 10 minutes in the end for reviewing and assigning action items to each person.
In summary, there are a variety of different approaches you can take to increase your productivity in your different work meetings. While the ideas listed in this article can get you off to a good start, make sure that you focus your strategy on your particular work group’s needs. You may find that you need to keep meetings to only 15 minutes while others might decide to do longer meetings. In the end, focus on finding the sweet spot for you.
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