Although mandatory for crucial decisions to be made, meetings can be extremely time consuming, especially for the busy executive.  I’ve had weeks that seemed like nothing but back to back meetings, Monday through Friday. How exhausting these weeks can be! 

Do you, like me, feel that most of your meetings are a complete waste of time? Unfortunately, a large percentage a business’s time-consuming meetings are grossly ineffective and sometimes a complete waste of time!

When I was flipping through Utah Business Magazine this month, I found an article called, ‘Lean Mean Meetings’ where a successful Utah business owner shares his tips for how to make the most out of your business meetings. These were great tips so I wanted to share a few of them in this post:

1. Distribute a detailed agenda prior to the meeting. More importantly, specify time frames for each item on the agenda so decisions can be made quickly.
2. Bring customer perspectives to the meeting via customer feedback or customer stories. This will prevent members of a business team from losing sight of the reason they are in business.
3. Learn from each other at every meeting by having members share things learned, or share other information obtained at conferences or lectures they’ve recently attended..
4. Foster conversation about overall strategy so everyone is tuned into the vision. Vision has to be communicated abundantly in any organization.
5. Make time to recognize employee accomplishments. These moments have “one of the greatest emotional impacts on the meeting.”

 I really like #3 and #5.  Continually learning from other team members is grossly overlooked in most businesses. Employee recognition in front of other team members is also overlooked and should be a common practice to guarantee employee satisfaction.  If you dread meetings because you feel they can be a waste of time, I recommend checking out this entire article found at www.utahbusiness.com .