How Do You Make Meetings More Productive?

One thing that you will encounter in the workplace that sucks a lot of your time is meetings. While you can be flexible about how you get your work tasks done, you don’t have a lot of leeway when it comes to meetings as they are scheduled for a specific time and date. This can make you feel unproductive with your work. I’ve had my fair share of meetings where we essentially didn’t get much out of it and it was a waste of everyone’s time. Well, I’d like to share some ways that I ensure I have a productive meeting because who has the time to waste? 

Set and send an agenda

One of the ways that you can ensure all meeting participants know why their attendance is being requested for the meeting is to send them a set agenda. The agenda should outline what you are looking to accomplish during this meeting like gathering ideas, making a decision, solving a problem, etc. By sending it beforehand, the participants can prepare themselves to contribute during the meeting and do so in a somewhat organized fashion. 

Do your prep homework 

Another way that you can ensure you have a productive meeting is to do your homework by reviewing relevant materials that can help you with your meeting discussions. If you’re making a decision, usually having data can help support the course of action. You want to come as prepared as you can so you use the meeting time productively. 

Open with the meeting goals 

Now, at your meeting, you want to start off by opening the discussion with the goals of the meeting so that everyone can have them fresh in their minds. Opening with this will help everyone remember why you’re meeting to begin with and what you’re looking to accomplish by the end of the meeting. 

Summarize and outline next steps

Once the meeting time is coming to an end, make sure to wrap up the meeting by summarizing what was said and most importantly, outlining what the agreed next steps will be. This gives everyone an opportunity to correct any misunderstood information or fill in any gaps that may have been left out. Usually, the person who coordinated the meeting should take notes so they can use these to summarize and outline next steps. 

Recap Email

Finally, to ensure the meeting time was productive and for accountability purposes, you will want to send the summary & next steps in writing via email to the meeting participants. This prevents what was verbally said to be lost in the void of sound. Additionally, you can reference it back as needed when there’s misalignments along the way of the work needed to be done as a result of the meeting had. 

While meetings can suck our time, if we prepare ourselves before, during, and after, we can ensure we maintain productivity with the allotted valuable time. What is one of the biggest  productivity traps you have encountered in your work meetings? Do any of these recommendations sound like they would be helpful to you? Let me know down in the comments.