Eight ways to make meetings better

You can make your meetings better, and you don't have to tolerate meetings that accomplish little or nothing. The power is within you, whether you are a meeting leader or a participant. Do you want to find out how? Here are some time-tested techniques to ensure better business meetings:

1. Be prepared. Meetings are work, so, just as in any other work activity, the better prepared you are for them, the better the results you can expect.

2. Have an agenda. An agenda — a list of the topics to be covered during the course of a meeting — can play a critical role in the success of any meeting. It shows participants where they are going, but it's then up to the participants to figure out how to get there. Be sure to distribute the agenda and any pre work in advance. By distributing the agenda and pre work before the meeting, participants can prepare for the meeting ahead of time. As a result, they will be immediately engaged in the business of the meeting, and they'll waste far less time throughout the meeting.

3. Start on time and end on time. Everyone has suffered through meetings that went way beyond the scheduled ending time. That situation would be fine if no one had anything else to do at work. But in these days of faster and more flexible organizations, everyone always has plenty of work on the to-do list. If you announce the length of the meeting and then stick to it, fewer participants will keep looking at their watches, and more participants will take an active role in your meetings.

4. Have fewer (but better) meetings. Call a meeting only when it is absolutely necessary. Before you call a meeting, ask yourself whether you can achieve your goal in some other ways, perhaps through a one-on-one discussion with someone in your organization, a telephone conference call, or a simple exchange of e-mail. As you reduce the number of meetings you have, be sure to improve their quality.

5. Include, rather than exclude. Meetings are only as good as the ideas that the participants bring forward. Great ideas can come from anyone in an organization, not just its managers.

6. Maintain the focus. Meetings can easily get off track and stay off track. The result? Meetings do not achieve their goals. Meeting leaders and participants must actively work to keep meetings focused on the agenda items. Whenever you see the meeting drifting off track, speak up and push the other attendees to get it back in focus.

7. Capture and assign action items. Unless they are held purely to communicate information, or for other special purposes, most meetings result in action items, tasks, and other assignments for one or more participants. Don't assume that all participants are going to take their assignments to heart and remember all the details. Instead, be sure that someone has agreed to take on the job of record keeping. Immediately after the meeting, summarize the outcome of the meeting, as well as assignments and timelines, and e-mail a copy of this summary to all attendees.

8. Get feedback. Every meeting has room for improvement. Be sure to solicit feedback from meeting attendees on how the meeting went right for them — and how it went wrong. Was the meeting too long? Did one person dominate the discussion? Were attendees unprepared? Were the items on the agenda unclear? Whatever the problems, you can't fix them if you don't know about them. You can use a simple form to solicit feedback, or you can simply informally speak with attendees after the meeting to get their input.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 797