10 tips of conducting efficient and productive meetings

I have done many meeting throughout my professional life. The meetings I had are ranging from external meetings with important clients to brief internal meeting with my peers. I always hear complaints from my colleagues that they wasted their time in the meeting and by end of the meeting, nothing was achieved. This goes on and on and on without realizing that we just waste too much time on non-productive meetings. I prefer to chair a meeting if I want to get certain thing done; this is because I can plan what I expect from the meeting. I always follow the 10 tips I would like to share here to better manage your meeting be it an important or trivial ones.

1. Plan ahead of the meeting. Always ask the agenda and objective of the meeting to ensure you are discussing only the relevant things in the meeting. When there are too many influential people in the meeting, you can be easily swayed away by their impressive story!

2.Document down the agenda and objective in an email and sent it out to each of the recipients such that everyone attending the meeting knows what to be discussed in advanced. Do not wait until the meeting starts. People will start yelling at you that they are not aware of the agenda etc. This will cut down at 15 minutes of debates.

3. Control the meeting by suggesting topics relevant to the objective when you realized that things are not going well during the meeting. Many times, people will start discussing issues which is not relevant to the agenda, and at this time, you have to bring those people back on track and advice them that they are in the wrong direction.

4. Identify who should do what action as the result of the meeting. I encountered many situations where many attendees tried to push their responsibility away to someone not in the meeting. At this time, you should advice that follow up action should be taken and end results should be delivered by a deadline. Prevent people from pushing their responsibility is very challenging task when chairing a meeting.

5.Identify any influential people that they may help you to commit a deadline if you are not that influential. You have to invite the correct people once you have identified the correct agenda and objective. They must be some people against you in the meeting but there will be some people are at the same side as you. Ensure you ask these people’s opinion if the voice against you is too much to handle.

6.Document down the action plan and follow up action immediately after the meeting. Sent it out to the attendees within 24 hours to ensure everyone still remember what they have committed. Trust me; this really works if no one is dong things for you!

7.Do not have meeting longer than 2 hours. People can get tired easily if you drag your meeting too long. Again this may depend on the agenda but you can break it down into separate meetings to ensure everyone is listening to you within their capability.

8.Avoid talking history or story in the meeting. Remember the objective and agenda.

9.Standard due diligence procedure. Ask everyone to switch off their mobile. Not vibration mode. Our intention is not to be distracted by other conversation. So switch off means no other conversation.

10.Remember the 9 rules above.