Meetings are often the dredge of the workday. They never tend to stay on schedule, some people talk way more than necessary on irrelevant topics, and important information presented during the meeting is likely forgotten.
What can you do to make your meetings more efficient, and avoid having so many meetings in the first place? Here are a few tips to keep your staff more productive:
Shorten the Meetings You Do Have
Staff meetings are inevitable, and the best way to handle a team or staff meeting is to keep the topic list short, with no more than three items.
Be sure you allot a limit on the time you spend on each topic, such as 10 minutes for presentation and discussion. If you reach your time limit, stop the conversation and ask everyone to hold questions for you to answer at a later time. Be the leader and don’t let the conversation get off topic.
Use Chat
Get your small business empowered with a chat feature through your email exchange, or simply use a free online chat like Yahoo! Messenger. When you need to deliver important information during the workday, simply invite your team members to a new chat and get the discussion going. This prevents employees from having to leave their desks, and they can still continue to work while information is delivered.
With chat, it is especially important to remember to keep discussions on point and short.
Choose to Delegate
Rather than wait for a team meeting to ask who wants to tackle a project, just delegate it to someone you trust on your team. Approach the individual directly and ask them if they are willing to take the project, and if so, give them the details. When you do have a meeting, you can better utilize the time by informing the others who is handling the project, rather than discussing who wants it.
Ask the Right Questions
During a team meeting, discussions are the biggest time drag. To avoid the over-discussion syndrome, learn to ask the right questions. Rather than ask “why,” ask “how.” Get to the point of how to achieve results without all the drivel about why a project is happening in the first place.
