People feel about meetings the way they feel about traffic in LA. You have to get through them to get to the important places like getting home, or getting to work.

Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. Many, many books have been written about how to have better meetings. Some companies are good at it and people at those companies feel good about meetings and generally look forward to them. Are any of you able to say this about your company?

The companies that have great meetings didn’t achieve this by accident. They carefully analyzed why meetings went bad, and structured rules to create effective meetings with clear outcomes. And significantly, they told everyone at company that meetings were now going to be this way, and they did what they said.

Here are 3 practices you can implement this week that will make a huge difference in how you and your team view meetings.

  1. Have a written agenda with copies for all participants. (If you email this ahead, all the better.)
  2. Set a time frame for the meeting, start on time, and end on time.
  3. Make meetings short. If you think it will talk an hour, make the meeting 45 minutes. Then, refer back to number 2.

Seems so simple, you can’t believe you read this far, right? So, do you consistently practice this in all meetings at your company?

Can you call a  6 minute meeting and get commitment from everyone to do this at every meeting from now on? Your meetings are going to dramatically improve this week.

Let’s “meet again” next week-this is only the beginning.