Meetings are our daily bread at Vyte – we build software around them, we have them and we think about them in many ways. How to make the scheduling experience best for our users? How to give our users the most time to be more productive? Often times the answer to more productivity is: less meetings. And yes, I say that although we really like to see our “confirmed meetings” metric to go up. The key is to hold effective meetings. Meetings that are necessary, short and on point. Here we put together some tips on how to achieve that.
- Ask yourself this question: Do I have to be at this meeting or can I be more productive otherwise? If you are the initiator of that meeting think about if it is really necessary to keep your folks away from actual work. Especially now in times of so many tools where asynchronous communication is possible and easy you always should consider this option. Also, I don´t know if you saw it that way. But a one hour meeting for 8 people is literally one workday – don´t get me started on how much money this can be…
- One of the most important meeting management rules: Run your meetings as you would have others run the meetings that you attend.
Being considerate of others is key to have a good and effective meeting. - As the meeting holder, you are responsible for distributing the meeting agenda and relevant materials to give everyone the best chance to prepare themselves.
If you are an attendee – use that. Nothing disturbs meetings more than unpreparedness. - Make a schedule, stick to it and in the best case: finish early. We already talked about how time wasting meetings can be. Schedules are a great way to limit your meeting to a specific time frame. If you scheduled the meeting to an hour it should last an hour at the most. Otherwise, you mess with others peoples schedule which can´t be good.
Plus: staying on topic benefits the schedule enormously 😉 - Have a clear statement of what the next steps are and a summarization about the decisions made at the meeting. This way everyone is leaving the meeting with a clear idea of what is happening next. It also lets people know who is accountable to make them happen. If you are a participant and the meeting lead is failing to do that, you should speak up. Otherwise, chances are pretty high that this meeting was a big waste of time.
Most of these tips seem obvious but look at yourself and others and then you´ll probably see that a lot of people aren´t really following them. So use these steps to improve your and your company’s overall productivity.
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