Productive office meetings can sometimes seem a little hard to come by. Especially when the average management employee spends 50% of their time in meetings, businesses need to focus on making every single meeting minute count.
On average, around 70% of office meetings prevent employees from getting work done. Considering the thousands of hours that each employee will spend in meetings over their lifetime, this represents a huge productivity loss to businesses. That is, unless you start running more productive office meetings.
In this article, we’ll go through the top three tips for more productive office meetings, covering:
- Focusing on collaboration
- Using action items
- Create office meeting agendas
Let’s dive right in.
Productive office meetings: focusing on collaboration
Collaboration is a tool that’s often overlooked in the workplace. Coming from fairly individualistic cultures inside a competitive capitalist machine can cause employees to focus on themselves and prioritize individual wins. While there will always be tasks that we complete alone, collaboration can be a wonderful tool to improve meetings.
Most of the time, when calling a group meeting, businesses are looking to solve a problem. Instead of allowing employees to come up with solution ideas alone, you can use meeting spaces to get people to work together. In the meeting, you can divide people up into small groups.
Each group will have the same amount of time to come up with and develop a solution. At the end of the time, each group can rapidly present their idea in 1-2 minutes. Not only does this ensure you have a number of ready solutions for a problem, but it also helps to boost collaboration in the workplace.
While collaboration in meetings can seem a little strange at first, once you have the ball rolling, it can be a wonderful way of keeping people engaged, boosting satisfaction in meetings, and ensuring that your employees work well as a team.
Productive office meetings: action items
In order to have a more productive office meeting, your employees need to know exactly what they’ve taken away from that meeting. If a meeting fizzles out and ends without clear objectives and action items in mind, then it can be hard for employees to understand what the purpose of that time was.
To smooth out this process as much as possible and prevent dud meetings from occurring, your business should turn to action items. Action items are a list of core tasks or responsibilities that your team will carry out after a meeting. These actions could be as simple as creating an asset or updating something, or taking steps toward finishing a larger project.
It’s a good idea to assign action items to specific people. Although this can seem overwhelming, the sense of accountability that it creates ensures that the task will absolutely be done. When you finish a meeting with general team action items, you may find that no one steps up to the task.
Think of meetings as a way of creating momentum in your business. Action items are that extra push that you need to set everyone on the right path. When this becomes a natural habit of your meetings, you’ll find that productive office meetings are a casual occurrence in your business. People know why they’re there, what they need to do after the meeting, and exactly what responsibilities they have.
What’s more, if you have clear objectives in the form of action items, you’ll be able to speed through your meeting, saving time in the long run. This objective-based format will save your business a lot of time and employee effort.
Using an office meeting agenda to get more from your business meetings
Meetings agendas are some of the most powerful tools that every business has at their disposal. In short, an agenda is a small document that outlines core information about the meeting. While every company does this differently, this could include aspects like:
- Why you’ve called the meeting
- What you’ll discuss in the meeting
- Who will be there, and what their role will be
- What you’ll achieve in the meeting
- Action items you’ll develop and take away
- Additional resources for employees to read before the meeting
Creating a meeting agenda and distributing it to all attendees beforehand is the first step toward hosting a productive meeting. Agendas are effective because they show everyone who is attending that you’ve taken time to plan out this meeting, making sure it counts. What’s more, the additional resources will help everyone to walk into the meeting as prepared as possible.
Using a meeting agenda is an absolute must if you’re looking to host more productive office meetings. If you start to require these for each meeting, you’ll notice that the number of unproductive and pointless meetings starts to rapidly decline. When people have to answer why their meeting is necessary before hosting it, they may realise that they’re just wasting time.
If you take one thing away from this article, it’s that meeting agendas are the most important tool you have when it comes to boosting the productivity of office meetings. And, under 40% of workplaces currently use agendas, meaning this is an improvement that most companies can take.
Final Thoughts
Meetings can be a hit-or-miss situation. While some seem like a total waste of time, others can be the spark you need to start a new campaign, develop a new idea, or create a new product. In order to boost the productivity of your meetings, you should engineer the second kind of meeting more often.
Of course, no matter how hard we try, not every single meeting is going to be productive. Things go wrong, wires get crossed, and meetings turn out badly. That said, by focusing on the three areas that we’ve discussed in this meeting, you’ll be able to create a more effective meeting strategy. Using these tips, you’ll be running more productive office meetings in no time.