When you’re leading meetings, it’s important not to waste time to ensure that your meetings are useful and have high employee engagement. Here are 5 tips for having a productive meeting.
Common Meeting Pitfalls
There are many common pitfalls when managing meetings and engaging employees. A lot of meetings start with far too much off-topic conversation. You want to start meetings in a friendly way but keep it to a minimum to keep the meeting productive.
A lot of meetings end late and you should be respectful of your co-workers’ time. When your meetings constantly end late, then meeting participants will come to expect this from you. This may cause them to avoid your meetings or not be as engaged as they should be.
If you are at the end of a meeting and nothing was accomplished, then everyone’s time has been wasted, including yours! Your meetings should have a clear objective and proper communication should be your goal both with employees and clients.
Having a Productive Meeting
When these pitfalls are a common occurrence, you will end up wasting hours that could have otherwise been productive. Your team will lose valuable time as decisions are not made quickly and your meetings are not structured properly. They may have to work overtime to catch up on their work so you need to think about the impact a bad meeting has on your team.
If meeting time is wasted, your team is not collaborating effectively, and decisions are not being made, this will only increase the number of meetings that you have to schedule in order to meet your goals. I see this a lot when key stakeholders are not able to make a meeting at the last minute and they have to be filled in later.
To avoid these common meeting pitfalls, you have to do your research to come up with the best solution for your team. Did you know that Hashnode doesn’t have meetings at all? There are many ways to lead awesome meetings and here is a list of the top 5 tips that have really helped me to ensure that my team is productive and no time is wasted.
1 – Urgent vs. Important
First, you need to know the difference between urgent and important. Do not be the person who jumps at the chance to schedule urgent meetings with less than 24 hours’ notice. Remember, when everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent to the people who work with you.
2 – Prepare Meeting Materials
Second, prepare and hand out materials for your meeting at least 3 days in advance. Having documentation for your team to read before the meeting will help to ensure that employee engagement is high during the meeting since people have had time to prepare their thoughts.
3 – Give an Agenda
Third, give an agenda with reasons for each included item. This will ensure that everyone understands the purpose of the meeting and what is expected of them. This also helps you to keep track of conversations so that you can steer the team to talk about only what was included in the agenda.
4 – Use a Timer
Fourth, you should use a timer. This will help you end meetings on time as you do not have to watch the clock so you won’t lose track of time. This also helps you ensure that each topic is covered as you move through the agenda.
5 – Invite Essential People Only
And fifth, you should invite only those who are essential to contribute to the goals of the meeting. Having extraneous people in the meeting usually ends up to be a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation. You also want to avoid having people “listen in” on meetings and never contribute anything.
Having a Productive Meeting – Courses on Pluralsight
You can learn more about meeting preparedness and engagement in my Pluralsight course, Fostering Effective Team Collaboration and Communication. This course includes animated scenario-based training and you will watch as a management team implements a communication plan to lead a self-managing team. By the end of this course, you will be able to establish a communication plan, avoid miscommunication, and provide your team with the tools for successful collaboration. Click the button below to get started with a free trial today!