Mastering the Art of Productive Meetings: 8 tips to boost meeting productivity

Are your team meetings becoming unproductive and time-consuming? Unlock the secret to maximizing your meeting potential with these 8 expert tips. Get ready to supercharge your team’s productivity and streamline your communication for greater success. Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

Here’s the checklist for those who don’t have time to read the reasoning behind each point:

1. First, is the meeting needed? Can this be resolved via email or Slack? If so, don’t book the meeting!
2. The meeting agenda should be the questions to be answered
3. Assign rough time slots for each question in the agenda
4. Carefully select the duration of the meeting (don’t just book 1 hour if you don’t need it)
5. Based on the agenda, determine essential and optional attendees. Mark them as such in the meeting invite
6. Keep meeting on track with the agenda
7. Actively ask quiet people for their input
8. End meeting by summarising answers to the questions from the agenda

Definitely too many laptops in this meeting

Details that no one reads

First and foremost, you need to carefully think about whether you really need a meeting. 55 million meetings happen every week in the US alone, according to one estimate. You don’t need to add yet another one if it’s not needed. Can you achieve your goal of your through asynchronous communication means? Then do so.

Determine the goal of your meeting. Your meeting agenda should consist of the question that you need answers to or that the team needs to find an answer to. This will help keep the meeting on track. If you haven’t determined the answers or what is needed to get those answers by the end of the meeting, then your meeting has been unsuccessful.

Once you have determined the questions to be answered. Assign a time slot within the meeting for discussion on each question.

Now that you have the above information, select the duration of the meeting. If your meeting needs 45 mins, then don’t pick 1hr. If it needs 15 mins then don’t pick 30 mins. If you finish early, great! Let people get back to work. Often people book 1 hr meetings because that’s the default time slot selected by calendar programs.

Based on your agenda you should know the people who are essential for answering certain questions. Everyone else is optional. You can have a broader agenda relevant to all members of the meetings, but once those agenda points are covered optional people should be free to leave the meeting.

Don’t get side-tracked from your agenda. It is the job of the meeting leader to keep things on the agenda and bring the group back on track if they diverge too far.

Actively ask for input from the quiet meeting members. Some people are hesitant in providing their feedback or input especially when other members are very vocally active. Make sure you don’t ignore the quiet members of your meeting and actively encourage their input. Similarly, you should make sure that vocally active team members aren’t taking all the time in your meeting.

Don’t abruptly end the meetings. Don’t end meetings on logistics. Summarize things and the questions that have been answered as a result of the meeting. Give the meeting members a sense of accomplishment from the meeting.

Try out these tips and let me know if it helped make your meetings more productive. Which tips and tricks do you use to improve your meetings? Do you have stories of your unproductive meeting to share?

Further Reading

1. The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance, by Steven Rogelberg.
2. The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya Parker.