We know that meeting with our teams regularly can help boost alignment and productivity. But not enough people talk about how bad meetings can have the opposite effect. Investing in a meeting organization tool can help you run better meetings in no time. Just follow the tips below to get started!
Clearly define the meeting purpose
We all hate leaving a meeting thinking “This could have been an email.” Having a solid one-on-one meeting with someone about an important topic is so valuable, but it’s also important to avoid overdoing it. The best way to keep meetings purposeful—and therefore efficient—is to create and communicate a clear meeting purpose.
The purpose of your meeting likely falls into one of these categories:
- To make a decision
- To share information
- To solve a problem
- To brainstorm/collaborate
While we could get even more granular with different categories of meetings, at its very core, most meetings fall into one of these. If yours doesn’t, that’s okay! Just make sure you can justify why you’re gathering everyone together vs. just sending everyone a quick note.
Create & share the agenda
An easy way to keep meetings efficient is preparing all meeting attendees with a list of what you plan to discuss ahead of time. This way, you can avoid spending the first several minutes catching everyone up on your thought process.
One of the coolest things about Bloom Growth is that you can keep your meeting agenda up to date in real time by using texting actions. All you need to do is text the topic of discussion to the meeting tool as it pops in your head. This way, attendees can stay as up to date as humanly possible without the meeting coordinator being tied to the agenda every minute up to the meeting.
Encourage participation
Have you ever been to a meeting where you genuinely had nothing to say and you were confused why you were even invited? Well, you were likely invited because the person who scheduled it really values your opinion on the topic. Make sure your teammates know how valuable they are to you by encouraging them to join in on the discussion, even if they think they have nothing to say (we guarantee they do).
Having a whiteboard session is a great way to force people to be interactive without calling them out. All you need to do is make it clear ahead of time that everyone is expected to contribute to the whiteboard equally. This eliminates the feeling of a singular meeting leader that contributes more than others, especially in virtual meetings.
Take good notes
Ah, the age-old issue of having a spectacular meeting and immediately forgetting all the important notes the second you hang up because no one documented anything. On the flip side, everyone taking notes throughout the whole meeting can lead to a decrease in active participation.
We recommended appointing one person to take meeting minutes to capture all the most important info. Make sure you talk about who’ll do it ahead of time so everyone’s clear on their roles when they enter the meeting.
Don’t have time to find someone to take exceptional meeting notes? Bloom Growth is equipped to automate that for you, so you don’t even need to worry about it in the first place.
Decide if it needs to be an ongoing discussion
Not every meeting is going to end with a nicely wrapped bow. There are a ton of reasons to have regularly recurring meetings:
- Talk about your priorities every day, week, month, etc.
- Having multi-part meetings to solve big issues
- Stay on the same page as your team over time
- Report goal progress or project updates
Meetings are rarely one-and-done, and that’s to be expected. The best thing you can do for your team is be honest about whether you plan to solve an issue in one go, or if they should expect to meet on a regular basis. Organizing your meetings to fit the format that works for your team is going to be the key to an efficient meeting cadence!
Want to have better meetings? Save time on structuring meetings.