Meeting rooms feature in many corporate offices across the country. They play a role in various elements of working life, whether it’s one-to-one catchups with your line manager, client meetings or group meetings with representatives from teams across the company. Our working environment can have a big impact on our productivity.
Here’s how you can improve the productivity of these meetings by following a few simple steps.
Scheduling
One of the key aspects of hosting a successful meeting is to ensure that the scheduling is on point. You should send out meeting invites well in advance so that people can keep their diaries free and prevent clashes. If you emphasise who should be present and who is an optional attendee, this will help people prioritise their calendars.
Make use of digital calendar tools to assess whether certain times in the day will cause an overlap of meetings.
Stick to an agenda
Meetings can be notoriously unproductive at times, particularly when there are lots of attendees present. People often get carried away with topics that aren’t as critical, which makes it easy to run out of time realising you haven’t covered the desired topic in as much detail as you would have liked. One way to avoid this is by sticking to an agenda. It can also be helpful to assign someone to keep track of time, prompting people to move on to the next discussion point where needed. This way, everyone will have the chance to share their thoughts.
Utilise technology
For many companies, hybrid working is here to stay. That means that workplaces need to accommodate the needs of those working remotely on the day of a scheduled meeting. Fortunately, technology makes this significantly easier compared to a few years ago.
Beyond dialling in remote workers using video calls, technology can also be used for interactive elements, such as PowerPoint that can help to demonstrate things visually. Often, it’s a case of using a USB cable to attach your laptop to the screen, then you’ll be up and running in no time.
Number of attendees
As touched upon already, meetings with several attendees can become chaotic rather quickly. This can result in an unproductive meeting that fails to address the key points on the agenda. A simple fix is to only invite the necessary attendees where possible. Sometimes, people use large meetings as an opportunity to focus on a particular area they want to cover, rather than sticking to the initial purpose of the meeting. Then, to ensure no one misses out, you could record the meeting and make notes to circulate after. Perhaps the same person in charge of timekeeping could record these notes.
