How To Make Meetings More Productive

Is It Necessary?

As the cliche goes, a lot of meetings could just have been emails, or perhaps a shared document or maybe a five minute chat near someone’s desk, rather than a fully fledged meeting that takes time to organise, deliver, and attend.

The issue is that a lot of businesses fall into the trap or habit where meetings just because automatic rather than something that has a purpose. That’s why you’ve got things like weekly catchups that just continue forever even though no one’s getting much from them anymore, and other meetings where huge groups get invited because you don’t want to accidentally leave anyone out, and so on.

So before you even start to organise a meeting, it’s worth asking one simple question: does this actually need to be a meeting and does it need to have everyone in a room together? If the answer’s no, think of another way to deliver the information - there are plenty of options

Require Participation

One person talking for an hour while everyone else just stares at them or perhaps takes some notes isn’t really a meeting at all - it’s a presentation. And although presentations are sometimes important, if you want people to get involved and give you some feedback or come up with ideas, it’s important to tell them in advance.

People are going to engage a lot more when they know they’ll actually need to contribute something, whether it’s opinions, updates, decisions, ideas, or even just some basic feedback. It changes the energy in the room because everyone stops feeling like a passive observer and starts getting interested in what’s being said. It also keeps them awake mentally, which is sometimes very important.

Invite The Right People

Some meetings are just too crowded and that can often be because people were invited to be there just in case they needed to know the information or they had anything to say about the subject matter. The problem is that the bigger the meeting, the harder it is to control and the more it tends to drift away from what you wanted to say in the first place. And it’ll take much longer to make decisions when there are more voices that want to be heard and put their ideas forward.

That’s why it’s best to just invite the people who really need to be there because smaller groups tend to get through things faster and it’ll be easier to focus. Of course, we’re not saying you should exclude people unnecessarily, but there’s a big difference between keeping people informed and making them sit through a meeting that don’t actually need to be a part of.

Send Out Minutes

You’ll often find that a lot of people leave meetings remembering things differently, or perhaps not remembering things at all, depending on whether it was an interesting meeting or even if it was relevant to them.

If you want everyone to stay on the same page and get something out of the meeting, it’s a good idea to send out follow-up notes, especially in busy workplaces where meetings are going to potentially blur together a bit. Clear minutes stop confusion afterwards because everyone can easily check what was said and the outcomes of decisions without just having to rely on their memory, which isn’t always perfect.

It’s even easier to do this now with various tools and apps to help you, including an audio converter that can save you a lot of time when you need to share what was said. Record the meeting, convert it to a document, and send everyone the exact conversations, and you’ll have no problems at all.