How to Make Every Meeting Productive

Useless meetings happen far too often. Teams don’t have to spend all day in a conference room to stay aligned, but too often, meeting after unchecked meeting negatively impacts productivity. While there’s no magic formula that will make every meeting efficient for everyone, we’ve compiled a list of tips to make them more impactful.

People’s time is a valuable resource. Before scheduling a 2 hour meeting with 15 people, consider the opportunity cost — 30 hours of time — nearly an entire work week. Ask yourself if this meeting is as beneficial to the company’s success as an employee’s entire week — how might you make it shorter or utilize less people?

Though there are certainly benefits to all-hands meetings, try to keep meetings small. The magic number of participants is 7 — any more is shown to lower productivity. Also, start on time and start strong, even if someone is running late. If you’re holding up a five person meeting for someone who’s late, no one wins.

There’s nothing more irritating than being part of a meeting that’s being made up on the fly, with no agenda in sight. Come to meetings with distinct objectives — ask yourself these questions:

An hour is a pretty typical meeting timeframe, and it’s definitely enough time to accomplish a lot, but see if you can do it in 30 minutes next time. You might surprise yourself. This comes down to psychology — for example, if we’re given two weeks to complete a project, we’ll spend two weeks working toward that project. In most instances, however, it could’ve been done in half the time.

The same logic applies to a meeting agenda. Budget an hour of your time, but have a goal to complete it in 30 minutes. Then if you go over 30 minutes, there’s no harm, but if you stick to the goal, everyone benefits.

Team management isn’t easy, and meetings are just one of the many things that contribute to team success. It’s never going to be perfect, but there are always ways to improve. Helm is working to make your life easier by building tools to make team management simpler at growing and distributed workplaces. With Helm, you’re able to visualize your teams’ OKRs in Helm’s Org Chart to stay on top of progress and employee engagement.

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