All meetings should be purposeful and efficient- not a waste of precious time, notes employee tracking software specialist Workpuls on its blog this week.
Workpuls’s Kristina Valjarevic has offered some top tips on how to ensure every meeting is productive and valuable right through to the business bottom line. But start, she suggests, by cutting down on meetings.
“Some companies have more money than others, some have a bigger number of employees, others have better tools, a couple of the good ones have more impactful ideas. All of these things can serve to give a business an upper hand when trying to beat the competition. But there’s one thing that you just can’t get more of – time,” she says.
Software from the likes of Workpuls, explains Valjarevic, can help staff at a large enterprise or a small five-person firm make the most of time, which has a knock-on effect for other finite resources.
Workpuls’s top five actionable tips for effective meetings
*Have a clear objective
Meetings have simply become a habit for so many teams, often under the guise of a catch up or strategy review.
What if you don’t actually need to meet so often? Instead, says Valjarevic,devise a new management strategy – only have a meeting when there’s actually something to discuss, like a radical change or problem that takes several employees to solve.
*Fix a time allowed for meetings
Limit the time allowed for meetings by setting a clear time frame for every meeting – and sticking to it. If you do not, there’s a real chance of going off topic when that time could be better spent actually working on tasks. A time-tracking app can help with this – not just with billable hours.
“Periodically, you can review your time tracking app data in order to see how much time you spend in them and analyse whether it could be less,” she writes.
*Get participants to prepare
Everyone who will attend should allot some time beforehand to prepare. This is also something that can be managed via a time-tracking app for office employees, or remote workers.
*Only invite the necessary people
A common mistake when organising meetings is inviting too many people. Do backend developers or content strategists really need to attend?
“Only call in the people who absolutely need to be there – the ones who can provide value or get value out of it,” Valjarevic says.
*Schedule meetings at a less productive time of day
“If meetings are when you just present your suggestions, solutions and opinions, you don’t really need to be your most productive self to make the best of it,” Valjarevic opines.
Once again, a time-tracking app can help divine which time is best for a meeting – perhaps when employees are most likely to otherwise be having a browse of Facebook or similar, she says.
