7 Steps for Effective Team Meetings

How many times have you been invited for several meetings that were a waste of your time or meetings without a solution or an actions plan? Do you need help to run team meetings effectively without repeating the same mistakes over an over? Follow these points, and nothing can go wrong:

1. Have a meeting agenda with clear objectives - meetings often stray from their initial purpose. Getting off topic is easy when multiple people are trying to communicate with one another, especially with video conference calls. Before every meeting, create an agenda outlining the points to be discussed. Taking a few minutes to do this for each meeting makes a big difference in the outcome of your meetings. It helps you stay on track and continuously reminds you throughout the meeting about what the objective is.

2. Set an end time and stick to it - creating a meeting agenda beforehand will help you determine the amount of time to allow for it. If you think you are continually running over end times, you are probably spending too much time in meetings.

3. Designate a meeting leader/chair - without a meeting leader; chaos will ensue every time. Your meetings must have a point person — typically the person who called the meeting or the manager can delegate someone of the team — to lead a meeting and to keep things on track throughout the session.

4. Cut down on meetings - many people call meetings without a real purpose. Before requesting a meeting, ask yourself if the information can be shared just as effectively in a different way. Some communication channels include email, internal memos, and project management tools. Or, another way to cut down on meetings is to merge similar meetings. This approach is a good move if you are a manager and talking about related topics with different team members. For instance, could you have a group meeting rather than three individual meetings?

5. Cut down on attendees - while merging meetings can be a good idea, having too many people in a meeting can dilute the quality of information exchanged. When meetings have too many participants, you can end up with endless discussions, unclear direction, and too many opinions guiding the decision-making process. Think of people best suited to attend the meeting, then send out meeting notes or highlights to the entire team if it’s relevant.

6. Create action items and accountability - use the ideas and decisions developed during the meeting, to create action items. And when these action items are created, assign them to members of the team. Log them in your project management system and link to the meeting notes so people can refresh their memory about the meeting’s details.

7. Stop wasting time on too many meetings