Managing Meetings Effectively

Meetings are a great way for a manager and his team to formulate creative ideas for projects or come up with solutions for any issues that they may have at work. However, these meetings can also end up wasting a lot of time if they are not properly managed.

Before deciding to call for a meeting, a manager needs to determine if doing so would fulfil three essential requirements. He needs to ask himself the following questions:

a) Does the meeting have a definite purpose?

b) Does it have a clear agenda?

c) Does it have a specific timeframe?

The purpose of the meeting should be explicitly and succinctly expressed at the very beginning so that the participants would know exactly why they are at the meeting and what they are supposed to accomplish. The agenda must also be stated upfront in order to inform everyone what they would be discussing or reviewing. Finally, a specific timeframe must be set for the meeting and each item on the agenda so that the entire activity would not cut into a large chunk of productive work hours.

If all the people invited to the meeting are not present, do not wait around for latecomers. Start the meeting without the missing participants and do not review what you have already discussed once they do finally show up. You would just be wasting the time of the people who came on schedule. Assign someone to take minutes of the meeting and to send these records to all the participants within 24 hours. The minutes would serve to remind everyone about what they talked about and what they agreed to do. It would also provide any latecomers or absentees with a summary of what they missed. By managing a meeting well, its effectiveness and productivity would be improved for the benefit of everyone involved.