Productive Meetings

Meetings can be set to be useful, or completely useless waste of time.  I am certain you have all been to meetings where a lot is promised and nothing is delivered or achieved.              There are action items a plenty, which never gets followed up on.  These are meetings with no accountability.

 

As per research an average employee spends nearly one day a week in non-productive meetings.  Talk about cost cutting.  Just getting together and talking about what needs to happen, does not make it happen.  The tasks need to be assigned to an accountable party, with a specific completion date.

 

Few simple steps to keep in mind are: first, create and distribute an agenda ahead of time.  In your agenda also include if there are any projectors in the room, or if you are using products such as WebEx, or GotoMeeting, etc..

 

Second, during the meeting have the agenda displayed in a visual format of your choice and assign the action items to each person, discuss the timelines, resources, and comfort level, making sure there is no room for different interpretations of what is being asked.

 

Be certain to distribute the action items document as soon as possible after the meeting to all attendees and ask for their feedback to ascertain that there are no misunderstandings. 

 

Last but not least schedule a mid-line follow up meeting to talk about the same action items, as they appeared in your first meeting and understanding the status of each item. 

 

Running your meetings this way will bring about few benefits: your meetings will be shorter and to the point; you get results on what was promised; and everyone is on the same page.  You can conduct these meetings with the basic software available to you, nothing fancy required.