If you have been to many meetings where a lot of topics ideas get discussed but little or no action is taken on them, you know how frustrating that can be. When I was a new employee at a former workplace, I was surprised how many standing meetings were held, week after week, in which lots of time was spent but the same topics were discussed again and again with no decisions or progress made. Like in many other workplaces (especially very large organizations), there was a tradition in that culture to maintain standing weekly meetings (whether needed or not) for numerous committees, project teams and other groups, with little attention given to how the meetings were conducted or whether they were productive. Many people spent well over half of their work week in these standing meetings, leaving them with no clarity about priorities or next steps and little time for accomplishing focused work. Frustrating indeed!
Meetings don’t have to be an uproductive drain on peoples’ time. They can be effective productivity tools if they are well organized before, during and after. Many smart business leaders recognize the value in creating a productive meeting culture and teaching employees how to use and run meetings wisely. Effective Meetings is one of our popular training and consulting topics.
In these three short videos, Debbie highlights things you can do before, during and after meetings to ensure your time spent in meetings gets results.
To prepare for effective meetings, do this before the meeting:
To have effective meetings, do this during the meeting:
To ensure the time spent in the meeting was effective, do this after the conclusion of a meeting:
If the meeting culture at your workplace could be improved, consider our Effective Meetings presentation or consulting, which is included in several of our productivity training programs. We teach individuals and groups how to plan and run well organized meetings that improve their efficiency and productivity. Contact us to learn more about this or our other training topics.
