3 ways to get more out of meetings

Are mandatory meetings taking a toll on your team’s morale? Unproductive meetings are the bane of many an employee’s existence. Not only are they a waste of company resources, they can also make workers feel that managers don’t value and respect their time. This, in turn, can even lead to high turnover rates and even more lost productivity.
The good news is that you and your fellow supervisors can learn how to lead better meetings, accomplishing more in less time. Here are some tips:

• Craft a clear timeline: Create a “travel itinerary” for each meeting, with minutes-long increments allotted for specific action items. Try assigning one person to monitor the clock, perhaps ringing a bell when it’s time to transition to the next topic.
• Give everyone a job: Make sure no one at a given meeting is a passive attendee. Each participant should have one or more specific tasks that they are responsible for. This will ensure that everyone is mentally engaged.
• Less is more: Connie Williams, an executive at a company that studies meeting best practices, recommends scheduling meetings for 37.5 minutes, rather than the typical hour. This encourages efficiency and emphasizes the importance of every wasted minute. “I think it’s funny. You set an hour for a meeting, and you’re always at an hour and 5 minutes,” Williams tells Fast Company. She says that the leader typically realizes with just minutes to spare: “‘We’ve just wasted 55 minutes and now we’ve really got to make some decisions.'”

These are just a few tips to get you started. Mastery Technologies offers several courses that provide more tips on having effective meetings, such as “Virtual Meetings: The Invisible Meeting” and “How to Have Effective Meetings.”
If you are serious about improving the quality of your meetings, invest in cost-effective, online management training courses available through Mastery Technologies. We offer an array of learning resources to help you improve performance and productivity.