Business Meetings 101 – 7 Tips to Run An Effective Meeting

Even though meetings are a part of our daily interactions, we never know what they may be: a super productive meeting or just another meeting that is useless and is wasting our time. Meetings can get you lots of work, or you finish many meetings and claim that you didn’t get anything done! After all, you can’t say you never entered a bad meeting. Maybe you were just in one, or you remember when the meeting you participated in wasn’t going well or started well and ended badly. Were the people at the meeting late? Or were they not paying attention? There are many questions to be answered, but in this article, we will discuss how to avoid these small mistakes and run an effective meeting with the following steps.

7 Tips for Running an Effective Meeting

Do You Need a Meeting?

If your team or other corporate members are demotivated to enter your meetings, they likely feel that your meetings aren’t necessary. When this happens, you aren’t only wasting people’s time, but you are also wasting your own time. However, when do you know you have to set up a meeting? Firstly, have you sat down to think about how the situation is within your business? If not, schedule some alone thinking time- only for yourself. Even if you have to schedule a meeting, you’ll still be able to do so later.

You don’t need to spend a lot of thinking to know where your business is. Instead, you can simply try to sit down for at least 10 minutes and think if you can handle everything on your own or not. Then, if you need external interference from people attending the meeting, send an email and schedule the meeting right after. After all, with the power of online meetings, you don’t have to schedule meetings face-to-face; they can be online.

Plan and Structure Your Effective Meeting

All meetings need to be structured somehow, so ensure you publish your objectives and agenda, even if it includes a few bullet points. Choose a suitable time frame for you and ensure it’s the right time for your participants. Also, remember that you want to avoid long meetings. They are harder to fit into people’s schedules and can take up a considerable amount of time.

Above all, there’s no ideal time on how long a meeting should be since you may never know how busy someone’s schedule is, and the duration will depend on the overall purpose of the business meeting. However, according to statistics, the general rule of meetings should be that they shouldn’t be longer than 60 minutes and should be anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes.

Alternatively, you can discuss how time schedules are with your participants in-depth. If time is tight, try holding a shorter meeting and if they are freer, hold longer meetings of up to one hour.

Moreover, whenever you see that you hold shorter meetings, you can start passing out a business card to everyone who is in a rush. Business card printing services allow you to do this, so you keep everyone engaged with any questions they may have after the meeting, especially when they are in a rush.

Set the Agenda

You’d be surprised how many meetings actually start with no purpose at all, and that is where participants will be demotivated to join. The meeting’s agenda can be summarized on a whiteboard or even a handout and then discussed on the whiteboard. However, before the meeting begins, everyone should know why they are where they are and the purpose of the overall meeting.

The agenda will guide the conversation and ensure that the meeting doesn’t get off-topic. So, if you have the agenda set up before the meeting begins, everyone will know what will happen from the beginning. Most business professionals won’t like to attend meetings if they don’t have an agenda set up. In fact, according to a study, most business professionals agreed that if there’s no agenda, the meeting can become chaotic quite quickly. After all, nobody wants to enter a meeting to discuss what they did yesterday!

Decide How Often You Should Set up an Effective Meeting

There are two important reasons behind a meeting, either to gain momentum or to change the course of how the business is functioning. By changing the course, we mean by encouraging planning sessions, negotiations, any emergency meetings, and more. In order to maintain momentum, you also need to hold regular meetings, but how often do you need to do so? Meeting too often is not a smart idea, and it might just be a waste of time. On the other hand, not meeting enough isn’t a good idea, and evaluation and improvement are just considered an afterthought.

Overall, there’s no reason to be meeting every day, but holding a meeting once or twice a week is the ideal choice. For example, according to Mark Zuckenberg, meeting weekly is crucial for maintaining a high-performance level at your company. Additionally, it’s best to meet daily whenever there are new employees until they know their own route. Furthermore, if you feel confused by anyhow, you can ask the following questions to assess better how many meetings you need to have:

• Is the meeting urgent? Do it every day.
• Is the meeting important but not urgent? Meet regularly but not every day.
• Is the meeting urgent but not that important? Have a one-off meeting.
• Is your meeting not important or urgent? Don’t have a meeting at all; just send an email.

Choose Wisely Who Your Audience Is

It’s an excellent idea to share information across the entire team and keep everyone fully engaged. Still, you need also to consider the impact the meeting has on productivity levels and your budget. However, suppose you want to reduce meeting attendance. In that case, you can consider using a collaborative project management tool that allows your entire team to view how their own tasks impact the project’s progress. This can help you save time by not having to update employees on their progress levels. For example, some collaborative project management tools you can consider using are:

• Trello
• ProjectManager
• Jira
• Wrike
• Monday.com, which you can learn more about through its free platform for project management.

Be Punctual with Time

As we mentioned earlier, everyone attending a meeting may not have too much time. That’s why you need to be very punctual when it comes to time. For example, if the meeting starts at 10:00 A.M, don’t push it a minute later or even end it after the set end time. Time is money, and everyone waiting to guess when the meeting will start is a big concern and a waste of resources. After all, if someone wants to be on time, they will.

Professionals around the world all respect time above anything else. For example, if you sit to talk with Bill Gates, he only gives you five minutes, and if you need to prolong that time, he will set another timer of five minutes. The most successful people in the world are all punctual with their time management, especially when in meetings.

Furthermore, the end time is just as important as the start one. If you have a habit of finishing later than your end time, most people will know that you aren’t punctual and do not take your meetings seriously. In short, you aren’t here to waste anyone’s time, including your own.

Don’t Forget to Have a Good Attitude

Nobody wants to attend a meeting that has a bad organizational culture, and this includes a bad attitude and much more. Here’s what you can do to show good behavior when you are in a meeting:

• Being punctual (on time)
• Paying close attention to what others have to say
• Listening as much as you speak
• Being positive and energetic
• Taking responsibility
• Respecting other’s presence
• Not blaming others for anything

By doing the following, you maintain a positive environment within the meeting and avoid any conflict with other participants in the meeting. After all, everyone wants to be around a positive and energetic person.

Effective Meeting – Wrapping It up

Well, that’s all on the seven tips for running an effective meeting. Hopefully, you have a clear understanding of what you can do to have better meetings in your business. Many people will attend meetings and not even know why they attend them. This is definitely something you don’t want to happen because the importance of a meeting is to identify where the organization’s issues are and promote improvement after the meeting has ended. Meetings are important, and if you find the right balance when organizing them, everyone, including yourself, will be happy to attend them.