Tips for a productive and successful business meeting

You might not realise how many hours your business wastes on unproductive business meetings. Or why your organisation is frittering away so much time? It might be due to being unaware of various time-effective techniques for meetings.

Fortunately, once you learn such techniques and start putting them into action, you could start seeing results stacking up more quickly. Here are some approaches that especially warrant heeding. 

Invite only those people needed at the meeting

Resist simply compiling a blanket list of guests for your meeting; otherwise, you could find that too many people there end up essentially twiddling their thumbs. 

That's what can happen if you invite more people than the meeting strictly calls for. However, you can prevent this occurring by, with reference to the initiatives and goals for that meeting, deciding which people are really required for it and limiting the invites to them.

Send attendees a clearly defined agenda

What is the agenda for the meeting? By narrowing down your answer to this question, you can more carefully position yourself to pull in the guests you definitelyneed. 

Furthermore, once you have decisively defined that agenda, send a copy of it to each of the invitees. Some of these people might even decipher that they aren't needed there after all and so step away, thus saving you even more in hours lost to unproductiveness.

Assign distinct roles to individual attendees

One key objective of distributing copies of the agenda in this way is ensuring that everyone knows the subjects to be coveredand in how much time. However, you should also check that, at the meeting, each attendee will have their own concretely defined role to keep things running smoothly.

A distinct team leader ought to conduct the meeting also attended by a timekeeper, note-taker and facilitator. The latter can help ease the flow of the conversation.

Keep a close eye on the clock

We've just mentioned having a timekeeper at the meeting - and, indeed, this person can be instrumental in helping to prevent the meeting dragging on beyond its allotted time. 

However, you shouldn't entirely relieve yourself of timekeeping duties - as, when writing down the agenda pre-meeting, you should specify in writing how much time to allocate to each topic. Prevent the meeting outlasting about 18 minutes; attention spans can hugely drop after this, research says.

Ban smartphones from the meeting

Did you know that the most common distractions during meetings can include social media, the news and online shopping? Smartphones have a lot to answer for, so ban them from the meeting before it gets underway. When US President, Barack Obama did this for White House meetings. Still, it's worth making sure that the meeting's environment is pleasant for people there.