We’ve all been there—the long, drawn-out meeting that takes far too much time, gets little done, and should’ve been an email. Sadly, I can’t help you get out of that meeting, but I do have a few tips to make it more seamless and productive.
Here are a couple of planning points to keep in mind to help your meetings run smoother.
- Communicate goals/expectations beforehand
In your email setting up the time and place for your meeting, outline the specific goals and outcomes that will be achieved by the end of the meeting.
This enables your meeting participants to come prepared and focused for the actual meeting.
- Make an agenda
While a meeting agenda seems redundant due to the pre-meeting email outlined above, I find that it serves as a tool to keep meetings focused, productive, and short. Having a physical list of talking points or problems to be solved gives the meeting more structure, which will help keep things on track.
- Decision makers and input
I find the majority of disdain for meetings comes from people’s experience of being brought to a meeting but not being able to contribute or having to contribute to the actual meeting.
By inviting only those who are direct decision-makers on the meeting topic, you eliminate many of the negative feelings that can arise from participants. This also shrinks the number of people involved, which will help keep the meeting short and sweet.
To ensure that the employees whose outcomes the meeting affects are still aware of the decisions that were made, I recommend sending a summary email to both the meeting participants and those whose outcomes the meeting affects directly after.
- Summary email
If you are like me, a visual learner, retaining all of the key information from a meeting can be a bit spotty.
Summarizing the meeting outcomes in an email gives your team a resource to go back and double-check that everything they need to complete is finished.
Dylan Coffey, Human Resources