Ask your employees and they’ll tell you meetings are one of their biggest productivity killers, said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in a recent blog post. That means meetings are killing your company’s productivity, too.
Change that with these five tips.
1 – Every meeting should have a purpose, objective and expected outcome. Define these and publicize them in advance.
2 – Eliminate presentations. Instead, send the material to participants at least 24 hours in advance, so they familiarize themselves with the content. This also stimulates thinking, and participants come prepared to participate.
3 – Begin the meeting with 5 to 10 minutes of silent review time. This gives everyone a chance to read the material, if they haven’t yet, review the material, make notes, get focused.
4 – “Once folks have completed the reading, it’s time to open it up for discussion,” Weiner said. There is no presentation. “With the presentation eliminated, the meeting can now be exclusively focused on generating a valuable discourse: Providing shared context, diving deeper on particularly cogent data and insights, and perhaps most importantly, having a meaningful debate.”
5 – End the meeting with a summary of key conclusions, action items, and assigned accountability for who is to do what when. “This summary is usually the first thing to suffer if the meeting has run long and people start running off to their next scheduled event,” Weiner said.
Your time is money. Everyone’s time is valuable. Don’t waste it. Plan ahead for productive and motivating meetings.
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