How to make your meetings more effective: Ultimate Guide

When planning a meeting, every team leader is faced with the same questions – when should we meet, who needs to be there, and what exactly are we going to talk about?

After you plan a meeting, it’s super important to prepare for it. If a team leader shows up with just a basic idea of what they will need to talk about with their team, the team leader often ends up looking unprepared or even nervous.

Using LogicalPlan to help plan out your meetings is one of the best ways to go. When you schedule a meeting and invite your team, participants will automatically be notified and the meeting will appear on their My Work timelines.

To get the best outcome, you’ll want to let everyone know ahead of time exactly what will be covered in the meeting. Make sure to include an agenda in LogicalPlan so that you and your team can come to the meeting prepared.

Keep careful notes of what is talked about in the meeting, in case you’ll need to revisit the topics later

Make sure you keep the “golden rule” of meetings in mind, which is “don’t have a meeting where you only talk about things that everyone already knows.” When team leaders don’t adhere to that rule, team members end up dreading meetings because they’ll be seen as a boring waste of time. And, since we all know time equals money, these meetings become a boring expensive waste of time.

Also, as we’ve mentioned before, it’s important to keep the conversation relevant to everyone involved. For example, make sure two of your developers aren’t having in-depth conversations about app development in a meeting with finance people or getting deep into balance sheets in a meeting with marketing people present.

If you see the meeting conversations start to go too far into one area, make sure you tell them that you can make time to discuss their concerns later, and keep moving towards the original goal.

Lastly, make sure to keep careful notes of what is talked about in the meeting, in case you’ll need to revisit the topics later. At the end of the meeting, review your notes with the team so everyone can understand what was discussed, and what your meeting accomplished.

Follow these tips, and you’ll not only have more effective meetings, but you and your employees will be much happier.

Happy planning!