TL;DR
- Meetings without clear structure and action items are a waste of time
- Use a checklist to remind everyone to do effective meetings
Intro
You likely all know this kind of meetings. Someone invites a group to discuss an important topic. The meeting starts. A lively discussion erupts. Good thoughts. Nice conclusions. But after the meeting nothing happens.
A nice meeting. But a waste of time. Nothing gets done without notes and action items.
Luckily it’s easy to fix. Let’s checkout my checklist for effective meetings!
A Checklist for Effective Meetings
- Every meeting needs an agenda
- Have a moderator.
- Have a note-taker. This can be done by the moderator as well, but it will slow down the meeting.
- Moderator makes sure that time-boxes of agenda are kept.
- Moderator stops long discussions or creates a follow-up for that topic.
- Moderator makes sure that action items with clear ownership are created.
- If it’s a recurring meeting, the moderator goes over open action items at the start of the meeting.
And that’s it already. If you follow that simple advice your meeting efficiency will skyrocket.
How Does an Agenda Look Like?
An agenda is a simple table with four columns: Time-box, topic, who and notes. Tools like Confluence or even Google Docs are perfect to write and maintain your agenda.
| Time-box | Topic | Who | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 mins | New meeting schedule | Raphael | … |
| 10 mins | Hiring best practices | Roger | … |
| … | … | … | … |
Why Do We Need a Note-Taker?
You can run meetings only with a moderator. But if the moderator also takes notes you’ll slow down the meeting. The moderator has to think about what to write down. This will lead to pauses in the meeting and to information getting lost. Not good.
Simple solution is that someone will take notes.
One Document for Recurring Meetings or Follow-Ups
Many companies have recurring meetings like for instance weekly team-lead meetings. These meetings could be managed in one meeting document. This often simplifies management of action items as they’re just in one page.
Summary
Running effective meetings is surprisingly simple. Make sure you follow the checklist above and you’ll see the productivity skyrocket.
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- Image on top by Redd
