There’s nothing worse than coming out of a long, boring meeting feeling like you’ve accomplished nothing and have wasted a big portion of your day. But meetings don’t have to be something to dread — if you are aware of why your meetings feel unproductive in the first place, you can take steps to remedy those issues and improve your efficiency.

Here are some of the most common reasons that meetings wind up feeling so unproductive:

• Insufficient planning. You need to have a set agenda to work through in order to ensure that your meeting progresses smoothly. Even if you’re trying to keep an informal atmosphere in your meeting, an agenda will keep you on track and, when issued before the meeting begins, will let people know what they can prepare to discuss. Agendas will also help to trim down meeting length, because there are specific time-slots for each item and you don’t have to waste time figuring out who should speak next.
• No one in charge. You should always have one person designated as being the meeting’s facilitator. This person should be comfortable keeping people on task, cutting short off-topic conversations, encourage positive discussion and generally keeping the meeting on course.
• Lack of foresight. From time to time, you might have items on your meeting agenda that could provoke strong reactions from other people in the meeting. If you don’t consider the way that people will react to these items, you will be woefully under-prepared in terms of how you will respond to that reaction. You may need to give a heads up to people who are more outspoken in your meetings to gauge how they will respond, so that everyone has a chance to prepare themselves and discuss the topic in a level-headed manner.
• Lack of follow-up. Even if your meeting runs extremely smoothly and seems to have a positive atmosphere, it will be rendered useless if you fail to follow up on the issues you’ve discussed. Make sure people have carried over what you’ve talked about in the meeting into their daily work.

Need more tips on running productive meetings? Work with the team at Viral Solutions today!

Copyright 2015 Viral Solutions LLC

by Christine Kelly

CEO and Queen Bee | Viral Solutions LLC