The 10 Most Useful Tips to Plan Meetings with Purpose

Daniels Langeberg | Follow

8 min read

I’ve been running my own businesses for over six years now, before then I worked in numerous multi-disciplinary design firms across the globe and in the public sector for over a decade. I’ve come to learn that it doesn’t matter what industry or profession you are in, if your job or business relies on people to get things delivered, you will most definitely need to have a meeting at some point.

How many times have you gotten through the day, or the week, only to discover that you feel like you’ve got nothing done because you’ve been jumping from meeting to meeting with no real actions in sight? Well you’re not alone, I’ve been there time and time again. Until a few years back I started to make concerted efforts to make my meetings more meaningful and in doing so, more effective for my colleagues and I.

This quick guide will give you ten essential steps that will enable you to conduct better meetings.

1. What type of meeting do you need to have?

   Before we get started it must be highlighted that a lot of what traditionally happens in meetings should not justify actually having a meeting. If your meetings only purpose is to ensure your team is up to speed with things, I would suggest using other tools to provide consistent, real-time updates and would move away from trying to execute this on an email thread.

   There are some great freemium tools out there like Trello , Slack, Discord, Google Docs and Dropbox that can enable your team to have regular, more fluid conversations in open channels to track changes and updates. I’ll be doing more of a deep dive into how to best utilise these tools in a later post. For now, you will need to define the meeting type that will lead to the expected outcome - see point two below. A good way to look at this simply is ask yourself, is this meeting internal or external? I’ll be providing some examples of these different types below with the majority of most business meetings being internal, the team over at Atlassian have done a great job in defining these into 6 main types:

   1. Decision making meetings

   2. Reflect-and-improve meetings

   3. Problem-solving and brainstorming meetings

   4. Planning meetings

   5. All-hands meetings

   6. Manager one-on-one meetings

   The type you choose will ultimately dictate the format and who needs to participate.

2. What’s on the agenda - why are you having the meeting in the first place?

   This is hands down, the most important point of all. The question of why (Simon Sinek is the guy to watch on this question) needs to be addressed and if you find yourself not able to confidently answer this query, then it might be a good indication that you shouldn’t be having a meeting in the first place.

   One of the best ways that I’ve found to do this is to think about what sort of outcome(s) you would like to generate from the meeting and then reverse engineer the steps, i.e. the agenda points that will help steer your meeting to that outcome. For example - you have a sales (external) meeting with a client and you would love for them to buy more of your company’s products or services.

   So your agenda might look something like this: Introduce yourself and your company > Ask questions about client's company and their 12 month strategy for growth > Ask questions to learn about the client’s pain points > Talk about some of your company's case studies that highlight solutions similar to what the client might be interested in > Describe the tailored services that could assist your client to overcome their pain points > Cover off rough pricing > Your Client Requests a Quote (ideal outcome).

   By understanding the outcome that you and hopefully the other parties of your meeting would like to achieve and then reverse engineering the path to get you both there, you can create an explorative journey that provides you with guidance and improves your chances of attaining your desired outcome. You may find that you chop and change some of the steps along the way, but what’s important is getting used to the concept of creating guiderails to keep everyone heading in the same direction.

3. Where are you having the meeting?

   Before COVID-19 shocked the world, a lot of our meetings were happening face-to-face. What we’ve all witnessed is a massive shift to online meetings. Another interesting by-product of the global pandemic was a new focus on making quality face-to-face meetings and the creation of hybrid meetings (video + face-to-face). The latter, as an example, has seen several core team members based in one location meeting via video conference with other team members that are working from home or a coworking space in other locations. This has all been enabled with the introduction to some fantastic video conferencing tools that allow individuals to talk, share documents, videos and basically anything on their screen, in real-time.

   Here are some free to try tools to consider for your next video conference; Zoom, MS Teams, Cisco Video and Google Meet. Just because you can video conference from anywhere now doesn’t mean you can slack off on your level of professionalism. I’ll be doing a more in-depth article in the future for some tips and tricks on this, but for now, ensure you have locked down the following; a neat uncluttered background, good lighting, your mic and video are good quality (and functional) and the room you are conducting it in has good acoustics with limited echo. If you are looking for a place that offers all of these considerations and more, check out our great range of meeting rooms.

4. Create a calendar appointment!

   For me the simple rule is; if it's not in everyone’s calendar then it ain’t happening! And really, do you want to be chasing around your meeting guests on the day via SMS, phone calls or an email thread? Why not use one of the vast number of calendar tools at your disposal like; Google Calendar, Outlook, Calendy, Doodle Poll. This will allow you to set it (and auto-reminders) and forget it. Pro tip; don’t forget to circulate your meeting agenda before your meeting. Here, email is probably the best tool. Or you could add a hyperlink to your calendar invite.

5. Prepare, prepare, prepare!

   My favourite quote to inspire me in my prep is by Abraham Lincoln, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first five sharpening the axe.” What he is alluding to here is that the best way to execute something effectively is to be well prepared. The first 4 steps in this guide have got you most of the way there, now you need to organise the actual contents of what will be discussed, shared, decided on etc.

   The best way to do that is to put it all in the one place. If you have used a tool like Google Docs to prepare your agenda, you can simply add hyperlinks below your agenda items to point to specific documents in your Google Drive, DropBox or MS365. This will enable a smooth flow of conversation and save you critical minutes (and embarrassment) sifting through folders during your meeting.

   Do not underestimate how much time it will take you to actually be ready on the day. Ensure you give yourself plenty of time to prepare your appearance, the meeting room and your equipment. All this time quickly adds up. It's not a nice feeling when early arrivals come through the door when you are mid-way through untangling electrical cords or trying to sync devices.

6. How to chair a meeting

   Every meeting needs to have a person responsible for leading the proceedings. To effectively chair a meeting is to ensure that all the items on the agenda are being addressed and enough time is being allocated to each item and those making comment. The most suitable person to chair a meeting is usually the one that has called for it to happen or has prepared the agenda. Whoever you get to do it, they should have a good understanding of the meeting’s purpose, background on the agenda items and the attendees and their respective roles. A good practice for the chairperson is to introduce everyone (if they are not well acquainted) and quickly run through the agenda items, as a list of things to cover, before getting into the details.

7. Note the time.

   We’ve all been there, in a meeting that was scheduled to run for an hour, only to still be sitting there 90 minutes later wondering what is on the specials board for lunch. This is mainly due to the first six points above not being properly considered and delegation of a timekeeper. If you are running small meetings then the chairperson will usually take on this role, but wherever possible, try and give this role to someone else so the chairperson can be eyes up reading the room and moving the meeting along. I would recommend using an hourglass timer or a countdown clock, there are also some apps for smartphones available online. The main purpose is making it obvious and visual for all attendees to see. This will make the timekeeper's role easier as people will be more conscious of the time they are taking when commenting.

8. Taking meeting minutes

   Effective meeting notes are critical to hold people accountable for things that need to be actioned and as a record for people to remember what was discussed and needs to be followed up in the next meeting(s). I would recommend doing this on a cloud based program like Google Docs to make access and circulation of the minutes seamless. This also enables meeting attendees to add notes (using the editing function) after the meeting or copy and paste agenda items for easier conversion into actionable items in the respective workflow tools. Best of all, these programs are available across devices so people can follow on their smartphones, tablets or laptops and you don’t have to sweat printing out numerous copies. Another win for the planet!

   Here is a simple template to get you started. Ensure that you note who attended, date and time when the meeting started and concluded.

9. Time for some action!

   Pro tip; don’t save your action points for last. Calls to action, or CTA for short, should naturally follow your agenda items and mark a point where the item has been discussed and the chairperson has asked the group to make a decision on the next steps. Ensure that your action point has been assigned an owner and a deadline for it to be implemented. This can then be followed up in your next meeting with feedback on how it went and further considerations from the action point owner.

10. Conclude

    Congratulations you’ve conducted a successful meeting by following the previous nine steps! Just like any good presentation the final step is to cap off your meeting. Quickly summarise what was discussed via your meeting minutes and actions to follow up. This should only take 2-3 minutes.

Let me know if there is anything that I’ve not mentioned on here that you’ve found to work in your meetings and throw me a like ❤️ if you found this article helpful.