If you are an employer, an executive or a business owner, it’s possible you’ve had quite a number of meetings with your team. The irony is we spend so much time in meetings yet we spend very little time thinking about how we can run effective meetings.

In 2012, Salary.com did a survey and they found out that the number one time-waster at work was ineffective meetings. Every day we see meetings becoming ineffective and less efficient because it is done poorly. Such meetings can create confusion and miscommunication among team members and can also lead to low performance of team members.  

Meeting that is done right is extremely powerful, it drives growth and development, it creates unity among team members and helps to improve communication.

In today’s post, I will be sharing with you 8 tips that would help you run an effective meeting

Let’s get started

8 Tips to run an effective meeting

1. Eliminate unnecessary meetings

Start by asking yourself this question, do we really need a meeting about this? There are information or issues that don’t necessarily require a meeting, some of these can be done via emails. You can make a weekly memo which can be sent to every member of your team to read, it can include a summary of what was discussed in the previous meeting and things that are happening within the organisation.

Not every single issue deserve a meeting. It’s easier to call for a meeting frequently when you have a smaller team member of about 5 to 10 people, but imagine you have a larger team of about 15 to 100 people, every single time you gather that large number of people you would likely be wasting each other’s time. So you need to ask yourself this question, do I really need this person in this meeting? This would help reduce the number of participants and would increase the effectiveness of the meeting.

2. Meeting strategy

Different meetings require different strategies and structures. For example, an organisation can have a board meeting where its board member come together to deliberate on issues and to make decisions, such kind of meeting tend to last long hours and is not done too frequently. While meetings with your team member are meetings that wouldn’t last for long hours like a board meeting, the aim of this meeting might be to create a bond between team members and to brainstorm on issues. 

To make a team meeting effective, you need to ask yourself, how do I get every team member involved? If you don’t answer this question correctly, your team meeting would end up a one-sided form of communication which would hinder the effectiveness of the meeting.

3. Clear goal and agenda

Have a clear objective and agenda for your meeting. You really need to think about what is the meeting purpose, do you want to decide on something? Or do you want to get input on something? 

It is important you have a clear idea of what the objective of the meeting is. It is more important to communicate this objective to your team members ahead of time so that they know why they are attending the meeting. When you have an agenda, it helps every single person participating to come prepared and also with the necessary information, for example, statistics, reporting etc. 

4. Choose the right time

Research shows that Monday morning is the worst time to have a meeting, despite the fact that it’s so common. When planning a meeting, you need to choose a time that would be convenient for every one of the participants.

Planning a meeting for late hours in the day can be ineffective because at that point the participant may be tired and exhausted from the day’s activities which can make them less productive. You can as well get suggestions from the team members by asking for their opinions on the perfect time for the meeting, then you can go with the majority.

5. Stay on schedule

It is important to start your meeting on time and end it on time. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for all the participants of the meeting to be present before starting. When you do that it becomes a habitual thing for them since they would be waited for. Immediately it’s time, commence the meeting, whoever is late would need to catch up, it trains them to keep to time.

It’s equally important you end on time because every single time you drag on a meeting, it affects the rest of the task these participants might have for the day. Having a clear cut time would help the participants prepare and be able to do the rest of their tasks for the day. It would be helpful if you have one of the team members as the timekeeper, this would help to keep track of time.

6. Don’t lose focus

Irrespective of having a great agenda you still need to manage the meeting in order to stay on track. A lot of times people brings up tangential ideas, it might be a great idea but it’s off the meeting agenda. You can write down such ideas for future deliberation but they shouldn’t be discussed at the moment because it is out of the day’s agenda

One of the hardest tasks to accomplish leading a group of people is to get them to focus. Whether it’s the organizer or any of the participants, someone should always take the responsibility of guiding the meeting back to the assigned topics and bringing back the focus.

7. End with an action plan

At the end of the meeting, summarise all the agreed-upon action items. Most people don’t do this, it results in team members not performing their tasks according to plan because they weren’t paying close attention in the meeting. 

At the end of the meeting, make sure you go through all the tasks assigned to every individual, you can go about it by saying, “okay, let’s review what we all agreed upon”. Put responsibility with the name of the person who is supposed to perform the task and due dates associated with those tasks. This would make your meeting effective and efficient. 

8. Get feedbacks

After the meeting, ask each team member to rate the meeting, you don’t do this for daily huddles but you can do it for your weekly, monthly and or even quarterly meetings. 

You can ask your team member to rate the meeting on a scale of 1-10. You should aim for 8 out of 10. This process can help make the meeting more effective because you begin to put close attention to why the rating is either low or high. 

You can have a one on one with the team member to get their opinion. You can ask, what do you think we could do to make the meeting more effective? What can we do to make it more valuable? Or what could we do to make it more productive for you? This could result in different solutions that you might not have thought of.