According to research by EventGrid, an impressive 18 million events and meetings are organized each year in the US, amounting to an incredible $280 billion in spending. This shows that although meetings are necessary, there’s a need to minimize spending. The best way to do this is to make your meetings more productive. Here are some top tips to keep in mind.
Stick to Your Agenda and Time Limit
This is the most important tip for ensuring productive meetings, and it applies to virtual meetings and physical meetings. Time is valuable, so you should set strict time limits and stick to the topic of the agenda. This forces you to focus only on the core matters. With virtual meetings, you may have the participants in different time zones, so it’s important to be considerate of other people’s time. Both physical and virtual meetings can be more productive if there’s a clearly outlined start and end time that everyone is aware of. However, be sure there’s still enough time to accommodate all the issues that need to be discussed.
Make Actionable Decisions
When you first schedule a meeting, you have a clear agenda in mind, and that agenda will be discussed in depth during the meeting. However, the most important question is, what’s the point of discussing that particular agenda? There’s no point in discussing something if you don’t conclude with an actionable decision after the meeting. So, during the meeting, it’s essential to be clear and specific about the end goal of the meeting. Otherwise, there’s no need to spend time on issues that can’t be resolved.
Do Follow Ups
As mentioned, by the time the meeting concludes, there should be actionable follow-up tasks. So it’s important to assign an individual or individuals that actually follow up on what was discussed to keep everyone accountable. To ensure that everyone is on the same page, you should also send up any follow-up information or details that become available after the meeting. This will further cut back on the time spent on meetings since you don’t have to hold status update meetings. In addition, keeping everyone in the loop in-between meetings ensures that future meetings are more productive since everyone is already on the same page.
Unproductive meetings happen more than not. This is unfortunate because time is money and wasting time on unproductive meetings is not good for your bottom line. Contact us today to discover how you can maximize productivity with the right meeting rooms.
