How to make meetings more productive

Maybe you attend meetings where the aims are unclear and you leave feeling like little is resolved. Or maybe someone in your team is struggling to juggle the amount of time spent in meetings with their workload. Either way, re-assessing the purpose, process and results of meetings benefits productivity, sidesteps distractions and allows staff to be more engaged.

Take a look at this short guide to maximise efficiency in your meetings:

Determine if the meeting is necessary

First, understand whether a meeting is the best way to resolve an issue or move a project along. Use the short checklist below as a starting point:

What questions need answering?

The more ground you need to cover, the more likely a meeting is the most efficient approach.

Who will be able to answer your question(s)?

If you need input from multiple people, email chains can quickly get confusing, or people can start missing things. A meeting might work easier to get multiple stakeholders’ perspectives.

Do you need creative input?

Often, when talking about visuals or creative solutions, getting a group of people together aids problem solving and lets people bounce ideas off each other.

Set an effective meeting agenda

If a meeting’s the way to go, establish a firm agenda beforehand – and stick to it. Include it in the meeting invite so attendees know what to expect and what’s needed from them. You can even write your overarching goal down on a whiteboard or notepad at the beginning of the session, so you keep on track. If you drift off topic, it will become obvious immediately thanks to this visual cue.

Give attendees chance to prep

Make sure everyone has time to prepare where needed. You can send any relevant documents to help contextualise the meeting beforehand, so attendees are all starting on the same page for maximum productivity and time isn’t spend quietly reading during the meeting itself. If you want to drive a discussion, people may need chance to digest the topic before steaming straight into this or coming up with resolutions.

Start on time

Make a point that the meeting commences at a set time – that time is not when people should get up from their desks and make the walk to a meeting room, or dial into a call. They should already be seated in the meeting room at the time the meeting is due to commence – not arriving at that time.

No distractions

Often, taking notes is another potential distraction – once people start writing, they aren’t fully engaged with the next point the speaker is making. Ask the team to close their laptops, avoid bringing phones into the room unless an urgent call is expected, and if notes need to be taken, assign this task to one person to avoid a room filled with people with their heads down. Give different members of the team this responsibility in different meetings so the note-taking is shared.

Maintain focus

Encourage your team to highlight off-topic comments or tangents to ensure you get back to the task at hand. Alternatively, the organiser of the meeting can lead on this.

Take a break

If you’re in for an afternoon filled to the brim with idea generating and problem solving, schedule in breaks. Keeping focused and on-task is impossible if there’s no chance for brains to check out and return refreshed and ready to tackle the task at hand. Breaks also allow plenty of time for catch ups between team members, which can then be left at the door when the meeting kicks off again.

Mix up the meeting length

Research from Nicole Steinbok suggests that the typical 30 or 60 minute meeting is an arbitrary amount of time. We assume we need a rounded length of time to work through a problem and solution, or brainstorm, or discuss a strategy. However, we rarely need this, according to Steinbok. Try scheduling a 22 minute meeting in line with her recommendations, and see if you can get just as much done in that time as you can in 30 minutes or more.