According to a report by CNBC, "American companies hold an estimated 11 million meetings every day." Now that was pre-pandemic, but that is still a lot of meetings!
Now I am sure we have all walked away from a meeting and said that was a complete waste of time, that could have been an email, or I don't even know where I was there. We have also been in meetings where people are so disengaged it is not even funny. Take the person who stays on their phone the entire time as if to say I have better things to do.
Below are six tips and trick on how to increase the efficiency of your meetings:
- Assess your current situation. Honestly, ask your self does this need to be a meeting or are we meeting just to be meeting. Could this be handled over the phone, video, or email? Should we do it at a different time of day or day of the week?
As shocking as it may be, you can ask your staff and employees for feedback. There are numerous products out that will help you do surveys. Survey Monkey and Google Forms are two that come to mind. - Have an agenda and circulate it in advance. Agendas are best circulated before the meeting. This will help those who need to prepare for it, be prepared, and enable certain personality types.
You should also not be afraid to deviate from the said agenda, sometimes being in the same room will help stimulate discussions and send you down a path you hadn't thought of. Just be careful not to let the discussion derail the entire meeting and making it a Completely Useless, Pointless, Odious Forgetful Timewasting Exercise About nothing! - Set rules for the meetings. If you are meeting in person, make it a technology-free zone potentially. While this may be difficult, it can help facilitate the productivity of a meeting. Also, keep the number of people to a minimum, look Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. He follows a strict "two pizza rule" in which there should be no more people in the room than two pizzas can feed.
- Praise and reward performance. Meetings are an excellent opportunity to recognize a job well done by an employee among their piers. Just be sure to make it authentic, as it can quickly come across as not.
- Maintain a positive tone. Focus on the positives and keep your meetings future-focused, unless you are doing an after-action report. Then you can talk more about what you did right and what went wrong so that you can be better prepared for the future. Also, don't forget the benefits of humor to lighten things up and reduce stress.
- Know when to stop but end on a high note. If you have made significant progress, then consider stopping and assigning action steps. Also, be sure to set the next meeting date before you break away to prevent the plague of trying to set the next meeting date via email!
While we can’t help you eliminate all meetings, we at Cube Creative Design can help you to grow your small business. Feel free to reach out to schedule a meeting on how we can help your small business grow. We promise to make it as efficient as possible!
