As much as many people bemoan meetings, gathering your team together to move a project forward is sometimes necessary. Fortunately, some strategies can make meetings a little less painful and a lot more productive. If your team is battling meeting fatigue, here are some tactics you can implement to make meetings better.
[Read more: 7 Best Practices for Hybrid Staff Meetings]
5 elements of good meetings
1. A clear agenda and objective.
To get value from each meeting, clarify what you hope to achieve. Before the meeting starts, circulate the primary and (if necessary) secondary objectives to ensure your meeting addresses the key decisions that need to happen.
The agenda should also set the structure for the meeting. Do you need to take time to introduce everyone, or can you dive right into the discussion? Make sure everyone is prepped well in advance for the purpose and desired result of the meeting.
2. A pared-down list of participants.
Often, meetings are derailed by too many cooks in the kitchen. Send meeting invites to a limited number of stakeholders who absolutely must be in the room.
"Only people who are directly connected to the expected outcome should attend the meeting. That way, you will not waste other people's time and productivity. This will also keep the numbers as low as possible, which means less interruptions and distractions," wrote Lifehack.
If you believe a wider group of people needs to know about the outcome of the meeting, circulate notes or a video recording after the fact to keep the group aligned.
[Read more: A Quick Guide to Hosting Online Business Meetings]
3. A point person or moderator.
It's helpful to assign a specific person to act as the moderator for the meeting, ensuring the group sticks to the agenda and works toward the objective. The person who planned the meeting does not necessarily have to be the moderator. However, and especially for video or hybrid meetings, it's helpful to have one person in the room who makes sure everyone is heard and keeps track of time.
In our organization, every leadership meeting ends with a review of a W.W.W. list captured during the discussion. It stands for 'What needs to be done,' 'Who is accountable for doing it' and 'When it will be done by.'
Tom Conlon, Co-Founder and CEO of North Street
4. A device policy.
If your meeting is in person, clarify ahead of time which devices can be brought to the meeting. Too often, team members bring their tablets or laptops and spend time writing emails rather than paying attention, or a phone rings and a key decision-maker needs to step out of the room, rendering the agenda useless.
Alternatively, some devices can help push the meeting forward. If you are meeting with a team of creatives, bringing slides or mock-ups to give the group something to work with can be helpful. If you have devices in play, let everyone know which software, documents, or video tools they should have preloaded before the meeting so they can participate effectively.
5. Actionable next steps.
All meetings should be wrapped up with a list of the next steps, as well as assigned team members who will carry the results forward.
"In our organization, every leadership meeting ends with a review of a W.W.W. list captured during the discussion. It stands for 'What needs to be done,' 'Who is accountable for doing it' and 'When it will be done by.' This simple tactic has transformed our meetings into meaningful vehicles for solving issues and implementing change," Tom Conlon, Co-Founder and CEO of North Street, a creative agency, told Forbes.
Many organizations send meeting notes to ensure everyone is aligned on the next steps and so those who weren't in attendance are still informed. If you work in a hybrid office, this can be a helpful way to keep everyone on the same page.
Ultimately, meetings should be used to reach a quorum and push decision-making forward. When a discussion needs to take place and can be held more productively live, use a meeting agenda, moderator, and focused outcome to ensure your meeting serves its purpose.
How to set clear objectives for every meeting
One way to make sure your meetings are useful is to assign a specific role to each meeting. McKinsey suggests dividing meetings into three categories:
- Decision-making meetings cover everything from routine decisions (such as a periodic business review) to more complex decisions (such as whether to expand to a new location).
- Creative solutions and coordination meetings cover innovation sessions, as well as routine working sessions, like daily check-ins.
- Information-sharing meetings are limited in value but essentially aim to raise awareness of the new information shared. Many companies are forgoing these meetings in favor of video recordings or podcasts that cover the same information asynchronously.
If the topic of your proposed meeting doesn't fit neatly into any of these categories, question whether it should be a meeting at all.
Once you know which category or purpose your meeting should achieve, you can set an intentional goal for the gathering.
"Identifying the meeting outcome first forces the meeting creator to think critically about their goals," wrote Mural, an artificial intelligence-powered work platform. "One way to picture this is through the lens of the desired end state. What does the situation look like before the meeting takes place? What about after?"
Best practices for keeping meetings on track and on time
Time management is challenging when meeting attendees have different approaches to solving problems and sharing ideas. Designating a moderator can help keep meetings on track and on time. Strong communication skills are also necessary.
"[Some] of the most valuable meeting tips may also be the least well-known because they're not about the meeting structure, participants, or even the agenda; they're about how the meeting leader prepares for the meeting and communicates throughout it," wrote Harvard Business Review.
Consider how you prompt others to share their ideas, provide concise feedback, prepare questions to further the meeting objective, and keep distractions to a minimum. Prompting people to make their comments brief with questions such as "What do you recommend?" can help move the discussion along.
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