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3 Tips to Boost Your Meeting Efficiency
- BenQ
- 2020-11-26
Meetings are unproductive when attendees show up unprepared and stay underutilized throughout the ordeal. Liven up your discussions by applying these three simple tips
How many times have you muttered “This could have been an email” after sitting through another hour-long meeting? You’re not alone. According to Forbes, many employees feel like meetings are a time suck that are more counterproductive than they are useful. They’ve expressed that meetings often end up impeding their progress rather than helping them get work done.
But like them or not, meetings do serve a purpose that cannot be fulfilled by email exchanges, instant messages, or voice calls. Several CEOs, in fact, prefer holding meetings, provided that they’re done efficiently. So how do you conduct highly productive meetings that don’t waste anyone’s time? Here are three practical and actionable tips.
1. Have a clear agenda and schedule
Regardless if it’s a one-time or recurring meeting, it’s important to schedule it in advance and furnish every attendee with a clearly defined agenda. This agenda serves two purposes. First, it automatically cuts down the number of meeting attendees. Too often, workers find themselves sitting through long conversations where their input is not necessarily needed. It wastes the time they could have used to perform other more meaningful tasks. It’s important, then, to invite only those essential to the discussion. For better meetings, Harvard Business Review recommends limiting attendance to fewer than eight people.
Second, the agenda keeps everyone prepared and aligned. Knowing what’s going to be discussed beforehand gives meeting participants ample time to come up with ideas that they can share with the rest of the group. This way, meeting time is better spent. Instead of using the first few minutes briefing attendees, the host can immediately dive into the specifics of their task while the rest can readily contribute their though-out solutions.
When scheduling meetings in the future, make sure to book a room and send the main talking points ahead of time. The BenQ DuoBoard and CS series are integrated with solutions such as Meeting Room 365 that allow meeting organizers to reserve meeting rooms with ease while simultaneously sending out the agenda from their preferred email platform.
2. Do away with distractions
In meetings, it’s fairly easy to get sidetracked. Anything that prevents you from starting on time or derails the discussion are considered distractions. These can be simple things such as figuring out how to connect your laptop to a display or passing the HDMI cable to another presenter (only for them to realize that their notebook uses a different connector). These little inconveniences add up and can disrupt the flow of a good conversation. As much as possible, eliminate them.
Meeting participants should not get bogged down by trivial technical issues. If your meeting room technologies—whether it’s a display, projector, or VoIP setup—limit the types of devices you can use or make tasks more complicated, consider replacing them. Meeting room tools should be simple enough to operate so that you can simply walk into a room and start right away.
3. Encourage active collaboration
Lastly, efficient meetings should be highly collaborative. Business meetings, at their core, are not solitary activities. Different functional personnel are gathered for their input because their varying expertise are needed to come up with holistic solutions. This is why creating opportunities for feedback collection and collaborative work is essential, especially during brainstorming sessions.
Tools such as a whiteboard (either physical or cloud-based), interactive screen sharing, or polling systems facilitate active collaboration and let meeting participants do more than just verbalize their thoughts. Cloud whiteboards, in particular, allow coworkers to not only visualize their ideas, but also drop multimedia files onto the board to get their points across more effectively.
Interactive screen sharing, on the other hand, allows meeting participants to collaborate by editing a deck or ongoing project onscreen in real time. Compared to the traditional way of presenting a static slide deck, where feedback is collated during the meeting and then applied later on, having the project file open during the meeting ensures that changes are not forgotten and are implemented correctly. Of course, not every project or discussion can be finalized in one sitting. Good meeting room solutions should allow you to record or export your sessions so you can continue them at a later time.
Meetings should facilitate productive conversations. Done right, with the proper tools, you can hold more effective sessions without distractions or limitations.