How to conduct effective meetings? You need to set a clear agenda, find the right environment and time for the meeting, assign roles before the meeting starts, give people a chance to express their opinions, stick to the planned time, and remember to ask for feedback afterward. Do you wish to learn more? Then we invite you to read this article!
How to Conduct Effective Meetings – Our Tips and Tricks
How to have effective meetings that will bring value to the whole team? What to do to proceed through those meetings quickly, while staying on track and coming up with the right conclusions? Here are some answers in the form of our tips!
Set a Clear Agenda
The first point of preparing effective meetings is coming up with the agenda. This not only helps with the organization but also enables you to avoid meetings that are a waste of time – for instance, ones that could, instead, be prepared in the form of slides and simply sent to your colleagues.
When preparing the agenda, you need to ask yourself several questions:
- What do I want to achieve with this meeting?
- What topics do I want to cover?
- How much time will we need for each topic?
Then, prepare an outline and write it down – it’s good to form your final agenda as questions. When the meeting starts, be sure to display your agenda and follow it.
Find the Right Place and Time for the Meeting
Running effective meetings requires you to consider when and where the meeting should take place. If you’re working in remote teams, this gets a bit more simple since you don’t have to worry about the location. But, in the hybrid workplace of the future, it might get tricky.
Forcing people to come to the office when they would rather work from home on that particular day will actively result in them being less engaged in the meeting. Therefore, you should avoid scheduling such meetings for Fridays or Mondays and always take the opinion of your colleagues into consideration.
The same goes for remote meetings in hybrid teams – if all the colleagues you want to meet will be working on-site on the day of the meeting, scheduling a call might get quite inconvenient due to an insufficient number of soundproof rooms or office pods available.
Assign Roles Before the Meeting Starts
How to run an effective meeting? You (and your team) need to know who is responsible for what.
The simplest example here is picking out one person to take notes that they will share after the meeting. It will help you organize your conclusions and ensure that you actually have them written down after the meeting.
Give People a Chance to Express Their Opinions
Returning to the point we brought up when discussing the agenda, an effective meeting is supposed to be a discussion, not a lecture. While you might need to go through a short presentation or underline the key points to discuss, your actual goal should be to let every person express their opinions.
This also means that you have to plan your time carefully, leaving a buffer for other people’s opinions and the discussions that may start as a result.
Stick to the Planned Time
There is nothing wrong with finishing 2-3 minutes earlier, but keeping the meetings longer than planned might be frustrating for your colleagues or even affect their other tasks. This is why you should be extremely careful when planning your time.
Sometimes, however, you just cannot predict everything. For instance, a discussion sparked by one of your colleagues might cause a detour from your agenda and prolong the meeting. To stay efficient in such situations, we advise you to simply propose scheduling a separate meeting to chat on those unexpected topics – well, as long as they aren’t truly critical for your agenda.
Ask for Feedback
While your first meeting might go great, there is always room for improvement. To make your meetings even more efficient, leave your colleagues a short questionnaire after each of them to let them express their opinions and point out how to make your meetings even better.
Constant evaluation and monitoring are crucial, as otherwise you might be repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Therefore, do not overlook this tip.
The Takeaway
How to have effective meetings? As you can see, it isn’t as hard as it might seem. You just need to come up with a clear action plan, stick to it, assign roles to your colleagues, and leave some space for expressing opinions. Remember that although meetings can be really helpful, sometimes it’s better to simply send a slideshow or a short recording than to gather your whole team together just to go through a few simple points.
You might also read: How to Increase the Productivity of Your Employees