“Meetings are time wasters!” so goes the saying.
I once attended a meeting where we spent an hour discussing whether we should add a full stop and correct some bad punctuation on a form.
It took us an hour discussing this and … nobody could agree what to do. So in the end, the bad punctuation remained on the form.
I wish I was joking, but this really happened! I find it amusing now, but back then I was really exasperated.
But I learned that while many meetings are a waste of time (and most certainly could JUST be an email or chat message), if done right meetings can be incredibly efficient.
My former colleagues at Renoir Consulting are masters at meetings. At my company, meetings never last more than they should and we always come out of it with things to do to move things forward.
Here’s what I learned about running effective and efficient meetings:
- Prepare an agenda of things to discuss.
- Always be ready for the meeting - prepare questions to ask stakeholders if you need clarifications, have a deck ready so that everyone can be efficiently updated about the status of the project etc
- When things go off track, gently steer the discussion back to the agenda
- Summarise the decisions and action items of the meeting
- Save your meeting notes at a central place so that your team can refer to it, or share them with the team in an email/project management tool
Rinse and repeat.