How to Run Effective Meetings

by James Shankland, CPA, Audit Manager

Posted on August 29, 2018

Everyone knows that running an efficient meeting, where all necessary topics get discussed and everything ends on time, can be very difficult. At best, an inefficient meeting results in frustration, or perhaps boredom. At worst, it means plummeting productivity, low employee morale, and ultimately, financial losses. After all, time is money! And yet, meetings are important to almost any organization, as a way to communicate and foster ideas, discuss issues, and promote coordination.

Luckily, there are a few ideas you can utilize to make your meetings both timely and meaningful. The first is to set a countdown timer (not a stopwatch) for the scheduled length of the meeting. The idea is to run the meeting like a TV show – it ends when scheduled. When time is almost up, ask the participants if another meeting needs to be scheduled to continue the discussion, and end on time. It’s important to be respectful of everyone’s time, and to prevent the meeting from going off topic. If you really want to keep people on track, there are various apps out there that can calculate the payroll cost per minute (or even per second!) for your staff to be sitting in a meeting. Nothing will speed up the conclusion of your meetings faster than announcing “we’ve discussed all of our scheduled agenda topics and have spent $1,200 in payroll. Shall we finish up?”

Another strategy is to keep things very interactive. Consider polling participants on your various points throughout the presentation. Don’t wait for volunteers – ask direct questions to guarantee participation. If you can, try to avoid relying on a Powerpoint. The point of a meeting should be discussion, so if you were just going to read through a Powerpoint, you might as well have just emailed it out to everyone. It’s also beneficial to keep people moving during a long meeting. When people sit in one space for too long, they become tired and uninterested. Every 30 minutes, ask every participant to stand up and stretch, or move around the room.

Finally, remember that it is always better to fit too many people into a small meeting space, than to have too few people in a larger conference room. It’s okay to wheel in some chairs – a more confined space gives the meeting a sense of urgency and importance, and ensures that people don’t want to linger too much after the meeting is over. You don’t want any empty chairs during the meeting; it can look as if the meeting wasn’t important.

Many of the above ideas have been borrowed from Boaz Rauchwerger, a speaker and consultant who has conducted thousands of seminars internationally on the topics of relationship skills, profit building, and more. You can learn more at www.boazpower.com.