Making Your Business Meeting More Efficient

We’ve all been stuck in a meeting that never seems to end. Whether it’s that no one is saying anything of value or the wrong people are in attendance, an ineffective meeting is a drain on time and resources for any business. Unfortunately, these problems happen far too often. Meetings are supposed to achieve something, whether it’s the transfer of information or the brokering of a deal, not chewing a pencil clean through or day dreaming about an upcoming holiday.

Here are our top tips for a successful business meeting.

• Have an agenda. Knowing what is going to occur in the meeting is beneficial, and a rough breakdown is more useful than no agenda at all, but the perfect agenda should be so much more. Setting out what a meeting and each topic of discussion needs to achieve is far more valuable. Allotting time to each subject will also help keep the meeting on track and cut out the small talk. The more detailed the agenda, the more likely you’re going to stick to it.
• A lot of time gets wasted explaining the purpose of the meeting before any discussion has begun. If you provide an agenda, supply the information, the documents and the topics that need to be covered, then you can cut meeting time in half, if not more. With no time wasted getting everyone up to speed on the subject, you can dedicate more time to discussing and debating over the issues. Potential downsides can occur with certain attendees not reading the material provided, however this shouldn’t be a recurring problem – no one is going to want to sit in another meeting with no idea what everyone is discussing.

·        Keep the number of attendees as low as possible. The more people you have in the room, the more chance that the meeting is going to trail off into tangents. Making sure that the right people with the right knowledge are in attendance is key; anyone superfluous is only going to hold things back. 

• Get the big stuff out of the way first. This is very, very important. It’s safe to say that after time, attention and interest drop significantly. If you want the best answers from the clearest minds, then attack the big topics as soon as you get into the meeting. If you leave them to the end, you’re going to be asking a room of yawning daydreamers to debate crucial issues.
• If it’s a quick meeting, you might want to do it standing up. It may seem a strange thing to do, maybe even a little new age, but having the meeting standing up will cut down procrastination. The reason? Everyone wants to go and sit back down (funny we know, but entirely true).

With so much time wasted in so many meetings, there are a thousand different ways that efficiency could be improved. During the writing of this article, hundreds of hours have been wasted by businesses in the UK alone. Take control of your meetings and take control of the time they waste; you’ll thank us for it.