Five Ways To Make Meetings Effective

In my opinion, one of the worse part after a meeting is the phase when you need to put all pieces together and come up with an effective and useful meeting report and action items for the post-meeting activity.

It’s pretty clear that not all meetings look alike. Some meetings lead to immediate action, other meetings don’t need anything (rare) and most meetings lead to… more meetings.

I found out that making a meeting effective is crucial for the activity after the meeting (and for your health). Here are five tips I learnt in the past ten years.

1) Go straight to the point

Sometimes I noticed, especially here in Italy, that lots of meetings are filled with discussions and chats completely out of the main scope. Nothing really relevant to the meeting (something I found almost inhesistent in all the meeting I attended in Silicon Valley) just useless background noise. My recommendation is to avoid it, as much as you can.

This “noise” is one of the first cause of loss of concentration especially if this happens often during the meeting. If you are leading the meeting, make sure this doesn’t ever happen.

2) Laptop, your best friend

Taking notes on a sheet of paper is old stuff. I like it, but I definitely find it far from being effective. Notes taken on paperbooks are not easily manageble and, if you look at them a few days after the meeting, it becomes more and more difficult to understand what’s going on in that sheet of paper.

If you can, take notes directly on your laptop. You can use a word processor or simply the notepad, making sure to archive them properly and with an easy to understand file name.

3) No, I’m not texting!

Make sure to explain to the other attendees that you are not texting since that’s exactly what I have to do when I take notes on my Blackberry.

Sometimes I prefer to take notes on my BB rather than my laptop. Why? If you use a program like Evernote (available for iPhone, too), you’ll easily figure it out. Evernote lets you take text notes and tag them, attach documents to them, attach photos (taken in real-time) and so on and, as soon as you save your note, it’ll be immediately sent to a central server which will deliver that note (or rich note) to your Evernote Desktop as soon as you turn your computer on.

The main advantage of this approach is that your notes can be enriched with very useful additional content, tagged and easily discoverable, ordered, modified from your computer and always accessible from your mobile phone (and more).

4) Real time actions

How often do people wait for you to send them a document / presentation after the meeting? Well, sometimes I do it in realtime. I have most of the standard product/service presentations on my Blackberry so it’s very easy for me to send them immediately.

Maybe it could seem useless or not worth it, but I can assure you it impresses other people positively and automatically transforms the action item “send docs” into “call to check they read docs” that equals in saving precious time.

5) Stand-up meeting?

Best meetings are the shortest. If you want to make sure it’s gonna be effective, remove all the chairs in the meeting room (if you host the meeting, of course…). I can assure you everyone will do their best to make the meeting as short, effective and useful as possible

Even better, before scheduling a meeting ask yourself ten (even more) times if that meeting is really useful and if you really need it. Sometimes you’ll likely end up discovering that you didn’t really need that meeting…

Do you have other tips to make meetings better? Please share your idea, everyone will benefit from it!

Tagged as: Communication, luca filigheddu, Meeting, meetings, Silicon Valley, tip