Career Success For Accountants

How To Improve Meeting Efficiency

Meetings present the opportunity for people to come together to share ideas, learn from each other and move things forward.

At the same time, they can become a huge drain on resources.

So what can you do to improve meeting efficiency?

  1. Make sure the purpose is clear.
  2. Have an agenda with allocated time slots for each item.
  3. Stop the discussion once the allocated time has elapsed.
  4. Make sure that people are clear on what should and what should not be brought to meetings.
  5. Teach people to listen effectively and use questions to clarify.
  6. Make the meetings solution focussed.
  7. Keep a record of action points rather than lengthy minutes.
  8. Follow up progress between meetings and ask people to give brief updates in the meetings.
  9. Have a clear start and end time.
  10. Challenge whether you could use technology to improve meeting efficiency and focus.

Truth is, meetings can be a valuable contribution to achieving results or just a drain on resources. What describes your meetings best?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here

About the Author Duncan Brodie

Since 2006 I’ve worked with in excess of 8,000 accountants and professionals in workshops, seminars and one to one helping them land their next jobs and become better leaders, presenters and business partners. Before that I spent 25 years in accountancy climbing the career ladder from Payments Clerk to FD. I’m a CIMA Fellow, Certified Professional Coach and Team Coach Facilitator.

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Leave a Comment:

9 comments
Gill Hunt says 7 May 2010

I think you’ve missed out point zero. Have 1 person who is responsible for making sure the meeting achieves what it’s intended to and who takes personal responsibility for keeping it to time. I believe these people are usually known as ‘chairpeople’ but they seem to be sadly lacking in a lot of meetings I go to!

Reply
Revino says 22 May 2015

Hi Duncan. Thanks for this nice article. We figured out that standup meetings are great but
needed improvement (they took a lot of time, de-focussed our colleagues and
interrupted their workflows). Because of this we developed a SaaS tool to ʺautomateʺ the daily standupmeetings – with just a single email. If you like to take a look: http://www.30secondsmail.com.
Best, Revino

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