Meetings can quickly become a drain on your company’s productivity if you let them. As Chairman & CEO of the Wish Group, I oversee several different companies. Meetings with my team are essential to keep us all on the same page and working towards the right goals.
So, how can you set your meetings up for success? Use the 5 factors of a productive meeting:
1. Information, Input or Approval
If the meeting is informational, ask yourself: “Can I send this in an email?” If an email is enough, send that instead and save everyone the hassle of a meeting. If the information is sensitive, extremely crucial to the team’s understanding and difficult to explain, or an opportunity for celebrating and appreciating your team, a meeting would be a good fit.
If the meeting’s objective is to gather input, multiple meetings with smaller groups will be more effective than one meeting with a large group. Especially when you need to be creative, smaller groups allow everyone to be heard. If you have a large team and need all of their input in one meeting, break the session into smaller groups and then reconvene all together near the end to discuss.
When asking for approval, an email is often enough. If you need to meet in person to explain complex ideas or put a group of people on the same page to make a decision, keep the meeting on point and get the approval or corrections you need.
2. Meet with the right people
I know this sounds simple, but the larger your team, the harder this can be to accomplish. Consider the points from above for gathering information, input or approval. You may only need to meet with one or two people on your team who are working on a specific project, or you may want to meet with everyone in the company to discuss strategies and overarching points. For decision making meetings, each decision maker needs to be present otherwise it’s a waste of time.
3. Clear Objective and Follow Through
The person calling the meeting needs to be crystal clear about the objective and explain it up front to the others who are called to participate in the meeting. When possible, an agenda should be given ahead of time so participants can prepare. The agenda will help keep you on task during your meeting so that you cover all of the important points.
Avoid going overtime! If you start running out of time in your meeting, pick the most important points and cover them fully. Do not try to cram too much information into one meeting when time is not on your side. After the meeting, summarize the meeting notes to cover what was discussed and achieved. If you didn’t have time to cover everything, consider sending the other information as an email or schedule a follow-up meeting at a later date.
4. Set Deadlines
Setting deadlines during a meeting puts everyone on the same page. If deadlines are established by clients, meetings give you a chance to review progress and reassign projects to different team members if someone has too much work on their shoulders.
5. Don’t Overload on Meetings
Sometimes teams set up weekly meetings because it seems like a good idea at the time, but not all projects can make progress at the same rate. My marketing team and I meet every Monday morning to discuss current projects, make decisions, and set weekly goals. We use our project lists in Zoho as an agenda to guide our meetings and stay on top of relevant project goals. A weekly meeting makes sense for my marketing team, but some of our meetings last 20 minutes while others take the entire hour that we set aside in our schedules.
I don’t have weekly meetings with the presidents of Wish Group companies because they are all working on diverse projects that don’t always integrate. It’s my job to schedule meetings with them when they are necessary so that I know how each company is doing, what they’re working on, and where our companies can work together to perform better.
A Wish Group Secret
A strategy that the Wish Group implemented for employees is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) every Friday. This strategy keeps me informed and alleviates unnecessary meetings. The KPIs are a self-reported system that provides insight into how my team is performing, where they might need help, and how we can continue working towards our goals. I find that a weekly system works best for explaining the tiny details of each project that can have a major impact on our progress.
Overall, meetings can help your company move forward faster when they are productive. Use the 5 factors of a productive meeting to set your team up for success and make the most of your time.