5 Ways To Eliminate Useless Meetings

5 Ways To Eliminate Useless Meetings

When organized correctly and run appropriately, meetings can be an incredibly productive opportunity to problem solve, brainstorm, plan ahead and get your team aligned on important tasks. However, all too often meetings become counterproductive and do little more than take time from your employee’s day. To avoid this, we’ve put together a list of 5 tips that will help your association eliminate useless meetings.

1. Qualify Meetings

When invited to a meeting, truly ask yourself or the appropriate parties if it’s absolutely necessary for you to be present, or for the meeting to take place at all. Do everything you can to accomplish what’s necessary via email or over the phone. Only attend or hold the meetings if it’s the last resort rather than the first.

2. Cut Down The Guest list

Every single person attending a meeting should have a clear necessity to be there. Keep the invite list short, and only for those who are closely involved in the task at hand.

3. Have An Agenda

It’s easy for meetings to take on their own, unruly path if there’s no structure or objective guiding them. Start each meeting by stating its purpose and end it with actionable steps to be taken from the meeting.

4. The Shorter The Better

Keep meetings timed and extremely short. Scheduling meetings for shorter rather than longer forces participants to be productive and stay on task.

5. Take A Page Out Of Amazon’s Book

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon goes by the two pizza rule when approaching meetings. Don't plan a meeting in which two pizzas aren't enough to feed everyone. He uses the reward of pizza to keep morale high, but he also uses that to force himself to keep the meeting lean, agile and simple.