Meetings are a way of life in the business world. They control how we do business today. They are so prevalent that each working day 11 million meetings occur in the U.S. Busy professionals attend an average of 62 meetings a month

How do meetings benefit us?

They are critical for management and communication. Some of the benefits of getting together include:

• an increase in motivation and productivity
• problem solving
• create new ideas
• achieve buy-in
• curtail conflict and confusion
• build teams

How do unproductive meetings affect us?

According to this survey from Atlassian, here are some attendees’ behaviors at unproductive meetings:

• 91% daydream
• 96% miss meetings
• 95% miss part of a meeting
• 73% bring other work
• 39% dozed

These inefficient behaviors result in longer meetings with fewer results. Then more meetings are needed to accomplish objectives. The responses lead to wasting everyone’s time and less time to get other work done. Furthermore, these reactions can create a cycle of unproductivity.

What is wrong with our business meetings?

 The majority of them are organized without a pre-planned agenda, and most of them end without having made any decision. Chad Brooks at BusinessInsideDaily.com identifies some of these main complaints:

• Don’t start on time, stay on track or finish on time.
• No specific action items or takeaway points
• No clear purpose or objective
• Not organized and no agenda
• Need to repeat information for late arrivals
• Boring and provide no new or interesting information

What can be done to improve meetings?

These complaints can be easily corrected. As a manager who holds meetings you have to take some actions. Alan Chapman at BusinessBalls.com in “Running Meetings” provides a treasure chest of ideas on how you can prepare and run your meetings.

meetings, how to run corporate meetings, and planning meetings

Holding meetings is an increasingly expensive activity, hence the need to run meetings well. Badly run meetings waste time, money, resources, and are worse than having no meetings at all. The need to run effective meetings is more intense than ever in modern times, given ever-increasing pressures on people’s time, and the fact that people are rarely now based in the same location, due to mobile working and progressively ‘globalised’ teams and organisational structures. Read the rest of the post…

Business meetings are a way of life, and they’re not going away. Invest time and you will soon be running productive meetings. Meeting management is a management skill and one that successful managers master.