Are meetings productive? If you’re finding yourself running here and there to fit several meetings into your schedule, it’s time to rethink if you’re doing it properly. Read on to learn some best practices for productive meetings.
Many people, including executives and employees, see meetings as a huge time-waster. But when done the right way, it offers opportunities to increase productivity, creativity, and innovation.
Being aware of the appropriate time to conduct meetings prevents you from wasting anybody’s time, including yours. Here’s a list of the suggested meeting lengths as compiled by the productivity app Slack:
It is not a meeting when:
Despite its negative reputation, meetings are here to stay. To utilize the time spent on this activity, here are some of the best practices for productive meetings:
Create and distribute a detailed agenda in advance to let your attendees know what to expect and to prepare for. Limit the number of discussion items to help you stick to your time limit.
If your organization’s “meeting culture” needs some revamping, it’s vital to involve everyone to come up with an ideal setup. Harvard Business Review recommends this five-step process:
Working together as a team rather than deciding on your own can help you turn exhausting meetings into a fruitful, anticipated activity.
A meeting is not a numbers game. You don’t have to meet with everyone just because you feel that “their presence matters” even when in reality, they’re just sitting there while their imagination floats somewhere far from work.
To maximize the use of your time, only invite the appropriate people to the meeting. For example, if you’d like to address a company-wide issue, you can simply meet with the managers and entrust them to relay the needed information to their respective teams.
Another way to make meetings more productive is to set clear rules which include, but are not limited to the following:
Prepare a list of action items and assign them to specific individuals before ending the meeting. Have an agreement about the deliverables and deadlines to guide the concerned person in finishing the assigned task.
Meetings become problematic when scheduled and held without considering the impact on both collective and solo work time. Before you schedule or accept another meeting, think twice about what you can get from it. Would you rather have your employees sit in a meeting without getting anything done or would you let them attend to their individual tasks? The choice is yours.
If you’re looking for an accounting service provider to support your firm’s growing needs, contact us today. For more information about our services, read our whitepaper D&V Philippines: Your Talent Sourcing Partner.