Are meetings stealing your time?

Have you been to a meeting, and questioned the value of the meeting afterwards?

Maybe the meeting was relevant to some of the participants, but not to all of them?

Poor preparation may cause the meetings to last longer.

Discussions outside the scope of the meeting may be another reason for inefficient meetings.

Implementing meeting rules can improve meeting effectivness. 

Meeting rules

Poor meeting management, lack of preparation and discipline from the participants, results in both frustration and huge time loss for employees and organizations.

Defining meeting rules might result in more efficient meetings.

Here are examples of meeting rules:

• Start and stop at the right time
• Come prepared
• Distribute documents in advance
• Set mobile phones to "silent" mode
• Open and honest discussion
• Silence is agreement

Meeting evaluation

It is usually not enough to introduce meeting rules.

The key to creating change is to follow up and evaluate: Are the rules followed? Have we become better?

By evaluating the meetings based on efficiency, you can continuously improve.

Here are suggestions for the checklist:

• Did the meeting start and stop on time?
• Was the agenda followed, and all points covered?
• Was everyone involved?
• Were actions determined, responsible assigned and deadline set?
• Was the goal of the meeting accomplished?

The importance of good preparation can be illustrated by the following example: An hour's preparation of chairman resulted in a 15 minutes faster meeting. There were 10 participants at the meeting included chairman. What was the effect of the preparations?

A net time gain of 1.5 t, or 9 min released time per participant. If this was a meeting held weekly, improved preparation could release between 9 and 10 days a year. If you look further on all the meeting activity at the company, effective meeting culture can provide significant time savings.

How will you make your meetings more efficient?