How to Boost Business Productivity Big Time

Weekly meetings can be highly effective and useful to your business - or they can be the perfect way to waste time, annoy your team, and get very little done. Too many meetings seem like they’ve been inspired directly by a Dilbert comic stripe, with the leader showing up unprepared and most of the members bored out of their minds. There must be a way to stop meeting like this, and turn in into a time well-spent instead? 

Here is a quick list of the habits of highly effective business meetings, putting efficiency and proper management on your agenda once and for all.

What’s The Problem? 

You will find at least two types of people in a dull, circular business meeting; the ones who keep talking and the majority, quiet and numb from all the sitting. It is no wonder so many people are fed up with being called into an hour of wasting time together with a selected few, unaware that the conversation is a dead-end and that 90 % of the participants are fed up and would like to go home. 

Consider the fact that the average American office worker attends about 60 meetings per month - and that about half of the meeting time is considered a waste. Employees continue to struggle with balancing personal life and work, finding time to spend with their family, and enjoy their downtime; a lengthy hour of loose talk is the last thing they’d like to spend their time on. 

#1 Only Invite Relevant Members 

Nobody likes to attend meetings where they would have little to contribute to, and the first thing you should do to up your boardroom game is to cross them off your list. The fewer participants you have, the more relevant input you will have - and the more you’ll be able to get done in a short amount of time. 

Small startups are generally a bit more tight-knit, though, so you can get away with involving everyone as they probably know what’s going on. 

The two-pizza rule (made famous by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos) is quite common for productive business leaders to keep the attendee list short and sweet; if you can’t feed the members with two pizzas, you’ve invited too many, and half of them won’t have anything of value to share with the rest. 

When you’re running short on knowledgeable team members, have a look at an HR recruitment agency for a few bright heads in your boardroom. 

#2 Keep It Short 

Some leaders seem to forget that weekly meetings break up the regular productivity of the office. Where your team could have been stationed at their desks and do what they do best, they now need to stop working and shift their focus for a short hour. 

Make it worth it and try to keep it as short as possible; everyone who could have been working should be able to participate in the conversation, feel genuinely involved, and that their time has been well-spent. 

This is just as relevant if you hold a meeting at the end of the day as your employees would love to get back home as soon as possible. An efficient meeting is to the point, engaging, and always relevant - anything else is a waste of time and costing your company valuable resources.

If you need to share data and wonder how on earth you’ll be able to keep it short and simple while also finding time to go through this, you can easily share it before the meeting. It gives everyone a chance to get up to date on the numbers as well and, rather than listening to someone talking about it, they can participate in the discussion. 

#3 Make It Actionable 

Remember back in college, when you could sit for a good two hours in a lecture, stumble out at the end of it, without really feeling that you learned anything of value? Employees feel the same way after a dull business meeting - 47% of them, to be exact, but a few simple tweaks can change this for good. 

If the problem with your meetings is too much information rather than loose talk, it’s a good idea to challenge your employees with a set of actionable questions at the end of it. Before you wrap up the discussion, ask them what they got out of the meeting, what their goals for next week are, and what information from the meeting they might pass on to their team. 

It’s not to put them on the spot, of course, rather than helping you as a leader find out what information the participants retained. Their answers can help you to make the next meeting a bit clearer and productive, as well as emphasizing the topics you notice they didn’t pick up on. 

#4 Take Notes 

Any decent business leader knows how to use her notebook during meetings. Make a note of what they’re discussing when it goes off-track so that you can return to it in a more relevant meeting, write down questions you’ll need to look up, and dedicate a page to be the ‘parking lot’ of the meeting. 

The parking lot is where you place any questions that are off-topic in order to keep the meeting as relevant and short as possible; let them know that it is an interesting question but, unfortunately, not something you have time to cover in this meeting - so you write it down instead. 

Your notebook is also ideal when wrapping the meeting up, as you can make a note of what the members got out of the discussions - if they didn’t quite pick up on what you had in mind, it is quick to write it down and go over what you found later on. 

Conclusion

When you get it right, the weekly meetings will be both interesting and productive. Remember to add a few elements of fun as well, though, so that your employees have something to look forward - rather than dreading yet another dull and lengthy meeting.

I hope you enjoyed this article about how to improve the productivity of your business meetings.

Interested in more articles about business management?

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