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Meetings are standard for every project, department, and team. Managers and teams often feel trapped in an endless cycle of meetings. This may have the unintended consequence of requiring staff to work overtime hours complete work.

So why do meetings have a bad reputation? Because they have become a defacto way to do everything on a project. Managers sometimes cut corners when calling meetings. When the meeting's purpose, content, and attendance are not planned - the meeting can cost the project time and money. Managers who learn to challenge the meeting mania and focus on gaining benefits from every meeting will improve the teams' performance and staff satisfaction.

Make Better Meetings by: 

1. Having a Purpose 
2. Making a Plan 
3. Connecting to action 

Three simple things to make meetings more productive for you and your team -

• Ensure that every meeting member has a reason to be there (meeting members should take notes and understand and plan how this meeting will improve or inform something about how or what they do on the job). 
• Every meeting has a working document to track the agenda, agreements, and actions. Templates for each meeting should be fit-for-purpose and reusable, and consistent in format. 
• Follow up on agreed actions. Every action should be tracked, allocated to an owner, and given a completion date.

Formal Meetings

Formal meetings generally are called for a group of people to accomplish a specific task. To keep Project productivity high, work to keep meetings focused and action-oriented. You don't want to have your time wasted; nobody does. So, ensure you have the proper preparation for every formal meeting. One of the easiest ways to create consistent meeting preparation is using templates. Think about which kind of template suits each session. Review how to complete the document with the team members responsible for updating the template before each meeting.

Informal Meetings

Informal meetings are those day-to-day discussions with staff members about project status updates, questions, escalations, and issues. They might also include simply reviewing a document or discussing an approach. Either way, it's good to have an agenda, organize your actions and follow up. Here's an example of how to do that using a paper or digital binder.

Track informal Actions and Follow up

Regularly review action lists that you keep for your ad hoc meetings and from your Project System. It is as simple as summarizing the task from each ad hoc meeting or key tasks from larger meetings you need to action or want to track and follow up. This will keep you on top of the key points you must focus on for the day. Check off what's done. Keeping the list simple helps you focus on the task, not the tracking process.