Do you ever end the workday and find yourself wondering where all your time went? If the answer is usually “meetings”, you’re not alone. Recent research has uncovered that meetings now take up a staggering 21.5 hours each week. At more than 50% of an average 40-hour work week, it’s no surprise you’re finding little time left for the day-to-day tasks, deep work, research, and other responsibilities that come with your job.   

What’s worse is that meetings often generate more questions than answers, and many lack conclusive results or firm decisions. If meetings are meant to share knowledge and help us work together towards outcomes, why do they too often feel like a loss of valuable time? 

The good news is that more productive meetings are not only possible, but they’re also easy to build into your culture. A few simple tips can help any small business owner or entrepreneur boost productivity of their teams.

The value of pre-work 

Stop rehashing past decisions and create actionable outcomes with pre-work. The time and effort you put into preparation for every meeting will deliver the best results. 

Any meeting invitation must contain a basic summary of what will be covered and identify the role of each attendee. This easy-to-digest agenda needs to go out with the invite; I don’t even accept meetings that don’t have this basic information. 

Providing the meeting context, and any documents, well ahead of time allows attendees to gather their own thoughts, collect additional information, and prepare answers (as well as think up questions that you may not have considered). This creates a much better starting point for discussion and problem resolution.

A collaborative meeting agenda also ensures that participants are engaged and their concerns can be addressed. And, as your team gets better at both defining the “why” they need a meeting and “who” needs to be part of the meeting, you’ll find meeting time decreases and meetings become more valuable.

Prioritise, prioritise, prioritise

One of the greatest challenges when planning a meeting is staying focused on the most important points. The best way to keep the conversation on point is prioritising the agenda. 

Order agenda items according to their importance. If the meeting runs over, the less-important agenda points can be picked up another time. 

There are a variety of formal techniques designed to help managers identify and sort priorities, including the ABCDE, SCRUM and MoSCoW methods. 

Regardless of the system you use, the key is deciding what to act on first, and what is contingent upon other tasks being completed. 

Depending on your company’s organisation and structure, you might also encourage managers to develop and use their own prioritisation techniques that best suit the needs of their team. 

Practice effective note taking

Proper meeting minutes focus on decisions and actions. Your team must clearly describe what is agreed in the meeting and attempt to identify any tasks (and their owners) that need to be completed to move forward. 

In terms of delivering the work, it’s helpful to remember the three W’s: WHO does WHAT by WHEN. Once you have this clarity, completing agreed-upon commitments from meetings is much more straightforward.   

Keep everyone on the same page

What you do after the meeting is just as important as what you do to prepare. A single, agreed-upon set of notes available to each attendee (and those stakeholders who weren’t present) will ensure you all walk away with the same understanding of decisions made, follow-up actions required, deadlines, and responsibilities. 

To make sure you’re aligned, appoint a note-taker for each meeting. I love to rotate the note-taking role to give everyone an appreciation of how important it is.

Using a workplace productivity tool such as Evernote ensures your meeting notes stay connected to the meeting details, follow-up tasks, open questions and deadlines you’re tracking.    

In fact, when everyone has the same access to the prior meeting’s notes, deadlines and task ownership, it’s easy to set the next agenda, and it’s a useful way to track progress and responsibilities. 

Ultimately, with hybrid schedules and remote employees, meetings have become more important than ever to keep your team organised, focused, and productive. 

With the right techniques and platform in place, you and your management team can coach your workforce to ace meetings and get more work done.