10 Meeting Best Practices to Get Results

Employees and business owners alike spend hours upon hours in business meetings, but is anything really getting done?

If you aren’t implementing meeting best practices, it can be difficult for you to tell if you are seeing progress or just letting out a lot of hot air. Meetings aren’t meant just to catch up and make sure everyone knows what’s going on.

Continue reading this article to learn the best practices for meetings and how to do meetings that are going to make an impact.

1. Get Smart About Meetings

If you aren’t being deliberate about your meetings and paying close attention to feedback, you’re likely missing out on a key point of frustration.

Your employees are tired from meeting after meeting, and they are feeling frustrated because of the lack of time to get things done. There are many meetings talking about all of the things that need to take place, but with each extra meeting that is called, people are feeling overwhelmed.

Learning the best way to go about managing meetings so people can keep from feeling overloaded is important. If you can decrease the number of meetings or pack more of a punch with each meeting, you’ll find everyone is happier for it.

2. Know Your Objective

Before you step into the meeting room, know what your objective is. If you’re going into the meeting room to see what you can come up with, this is a recipe for disaster.

While there is a time and place for getting together to brainstorm, make sure you still have a jumping-off point and know what you want to achieve.

3. Write Out the Meeting Agenda

Once you know what your objective is, write out the meeting agenda. Having a written meeting agenda allows everyone to see what needs to take place physically.

The clearer you can get about what you want to happen, the better it is for everyone involved.

4. Take Your Own Notes

Even if you have a person that has the job of taking notes, you should have your own notes. You never know when you might find something noteworthy that the note-taker doesn’t deem important.

Taking your own notes also helps you keep on track and helps you remember the main points of the meeting.

5. Meet Out of the Office

Everyone is likely tired of being in the office. They sit at their desks throughout the day, and they are just waiting to get out and back to their lives.

When you meet out of the office, it is easier to get people’s attention and keep them on task.

Make sure the place that you meet isn’t too loud, so it is easy to get your message across to everyone.

6. Don’t Invite Unnecessary Attendees

You don’t have to invite everyone in the office just because they are in the office.

Having people at meetings that aren’t necessary takes up their time and costs you money in wages.

Before inviting anyone to a meeting, ask yourself multiple times if this person needs to be at the meeting. If you answer that they do need to be at the meeting, ask yourself why.

If you can’t come up with a good reason why they should be at the meeting, don’t invite them.

7. Be Early or On Time

Getting to a meeting late puts everyone in the wrong mindset and mode. Being early or on time shows how important the meeting is and that you value everyone’s time.

8. Avoid Multitasking

Avoid multitasking, whether that’s you or someone else. If you need someone to take notes, that should be someone that doesn’t need to be participating in the meeting.

You should ask people to keep their phones on silent and not to check their phones. If everyone stops multitasking, the meeting can get done quickly with the objective being achieved.

Multitasking usually only means that you are doing multiple things poorly. Focus is key when you want to have a good meeting and keep everyone on the same page.

9. Stand Up

Do you really want to keep people on their tiptoes and paying attention? Standing up during meetings is a good way to get office workers out of their seats and into a little bit of movement.

Not only do standing meetings help your employees get up and moving, but they make it more difficult for people to hide their phones under the table for text checking.

People that are standing up in the meeting are likely to make decisions faster and to be more interactive.

10. Keep Your Meetings Short & Sweet

There is no reason a thirty-minute meeting has to stay a thirty-minute meeting. If you can get the meeting done in ten minutes then, by all means, finish the meeting up in ten minutes.

Being in meetings for the sake of being in a meeting is very last decade, and now the name of the game is short and sweet meetings to get back to work at hand.

Now You Know Meeting Best Practices

Now that you know meeting best practices, it’s time to put them to work for you and see which ones help your business the most.

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