Answer: This is a common problem. Meetings are like a black hole that swallows up time, patience and productivity at most companies. Here are some ground rules for making them more effective and productive:
Limit meetings to those that are truly necessary to accomplish specified goals. Standing meetings that happen too frequently, information-sharing meetings where no discussion will occur, “face-time” meetings, and the like are often poor uses of everyone’s time.
Instead of spontaneously scheduling meetings every time something comes up for discussion, consider establishing a standing meeting on whatever schedule works for your group. A one-hour meeting once a week to go over everything that’s come up since last week’s meeting is far more productive than several 10-30 minute meetings during each week.
At every meeting:
Start with a shared goal
Have an agenda (distributed in advance if possible) and clear, relevant topics
Have all needed participants present – and no one else
Start and end on time
Stay on topic
Speak openly
Listen carefully
Don’t let people disappear – check out silence to get all views
Challenge ideas, not people
Use the last 5-15 minutes to summarize, recap, conclude, assign follow-up tasks and, if necessary, schedule follow-up meetings
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