5 Tips For a Useful Meeting

It’s fashionable to say that you hate meetings, but let’s be honest: we need them.

As organizations try to encourage collaboration and develop synergy between employees, there’s no getting away from the fact that people need to actually talk to each other. Whether it’s one-on-one or in a larger group, meetings need to happen. The trick is to make them worthwhile.

Before holding a meeting, make sure you understand the purpose. Are you giving direction, or gathering inputs, or simply updating people on progress? Each of these different purposes leads to a different meeting dynamic, so be sure to know why you’re meeting.

In fact, make sure everyone knows; the easiest way to do this is to have an agenda. When you send out an email requesting that people attend a meeting, include the points to be discussed and the resolution you expect to achieve. Not only does this help keep the meeting on topic, it also allows people to see if this relay isn’t relevant to them, and they should decline.

That’s another point to keep in mind; only have people attend who need to attend. It’s commonplace to invite people who don’t really need to be here, in an attempt to keep everyone up to date, but that can be accomplished more easily by back-briefing them. You can send notes from the meeting out to a bigger audience, or ask attendees to brief others on necessary points.

In fact, you should always send notes afterwards. These don’t need to be super-detailed, but they do need to include anything that you think everyone agreed to. People often need reminders about what was discussed, and this is also an opportunity for someone to get clarification if they walked away with a different idea about what was decided.

Finally, consider the timing. On the one hand you might think that a meeting at 4pm on Friday will certainly finish on time, but then again you may find people paying very little attention. Try to avoid heavy-work periods when people will be more focused on deadlines; calling the sales team together two days before the end of a quarter might not be very effective. If you’re going to have regular meetings, try to be consistent; when people know that one hour every Wednesday morning will be devoted to a meeting starting at 9am, they can plan other things around it, rather than you trying to plan a meeting around other things.

Meetings are a necessary part of work life, so we might as well make them effective. Over time, as people realize that you only call a meeting when you need one, that the people who are there are the people who need to be there, and that something actually gets accomplished…well, they still might not be enthusiastic about attending, but they will come with much less negativity, at least.