How to Use Meeting Facilities for More Productive Meetings
Let’s face it, nobody enjoys sitting through a long and potentially unproductive meeting. The average person will become bored and detached from a meeting that runs too long. Any meeting exceeding 30 minutes and your meeting room space begins to feel like a trap for the attendees –no one is getting anything done, so people start to focus their attention on external matters. Consider this: if your company cut out a single hour of the time spent in meeting facilities for team gatherings each week, your staff would have an extra weeks’ worth of time saved for more productive matters related to the job at hand.
Here are some strategies to turn your meeting room space into the most efficient and productive room in the office:
1) Hold meeting early in the day, and end on time
It’s never a good idea to hold a team meeting towards the end of the day. When employees notice meetings are being held consistently at the end of a long and tiring day, bad habits begin to emerge. Towards the end of the day people’s main focus is on getting home, and hoping to be out in time to beat traffic. Employees and upper management alike will slowly trickle into meeting facilities for meetings scheduled any time after 3 p.m., and see showing up promptly as more of a burden than a productive way to end the day. Here’s a tip: create an agenda prior to the meeting laying out what will be discussed in the meeting –include a timeline of the allocated minutes for each topic. From there, only email this agenda to the relevant parties you wish to attend the meeting. Once everyone is present in the meeting room space, have the agenda up on a whiteboard or projector screen for everyone to follow along.
2) Offer scheduled breaks during long meetings
If you’ve booked a meeting facility for a two hour meeting or longer, schedule an outlined break time to include in the agenda for the meeting. Here’s a tip: Offer a 10 minute scheduled breaks so attendees have an opportunity to walk around to stretch, check their emails and voice mails, or use the washroom without disturbing the flow of the meeting. Otherwise, people become distracted and lose focus when they feel out of touch from other duties for a long duration of time.
3) Close with specific action plans
Perhaps the most important component of any productive meeting is the action plan– be very specific about who is to do what before the next scheduled meeting. Here’s a tip: have a meeting minutes tracker assigned for each meeting, to keep track of what is to follow in consequence of the meeting. By the end of the meeting, each item on the list should be reviewed to ensure everyone is clear on what is required of them, who is to do what, and by when?
For more great tips on how to turn your meeting room space into the most productive room in your office, click here.
