It’s not hard to have an unproductive meeting. Bad meetings cause
employees and managers alike frustration and anxiety, and the longer
these inefficient meetings drone on, the longer your team is unable to
get back to work and making progress on their projects.
If you want to frustrate your employees and hold long, agonizing meetings, be sure to follow these tips:
Learn how to use complicated meeting technology right at the start of the meeting.
If the collaboration technology you use for your meeting is too easy
to use, or too user-friendly, it won’t take as long to get set up right
before a meeting. So instead of starting on time, you’ll need to take a
few minutes not talking about the purpose of the meeting to get
everything configured and learn how to interact with your collaboration
tools.
Don’t have a set agenda, just ramble on.
Outlines for a meeting’s agenda help keep a team too on track to end a
meeting on time. Having an agenda make the whole conversation more
focused and engaged. It’s better to just ramble on with your train of
thought than keep yourself focused and on task during the whole meeting
by having a reminder of the meeting’s goals.
Review previous conversations and add nothing new.
To have a bad meeting, it’s best to take a while to get to the point
of your meeting. Reading over the last meeting’s notes is a great way to
slow down the momentum of your team. That way they can hear what items
are still on their to-do list that they could be doing right now instead
of sitting in a meeting. If you don’t add any follow ups or additions
to these notes, your team will feel like you’ve had a meeting just to
remind people of what your last meeting was about.
Don’t make any decisions during the meeting.
A good meeting is all about discussing your options, gathering
information and coming up with a solution or game plan. So to have a bad
meeting, make sure that you never walk away with a clear sense of what
you will be doing next. Your team won’t be sure how to quickly proceed
with your plans until either your next email or meeting.
Good meetings are important to your organization. Don’t make the same
mistakes that breed bad meetings. Plan ahead to save time, and use
technology that is easy and quick to pick up do you can start on time.
Meetings help your team get on the same foot and figure out your
goals. But don’t keep them too long, since it’s only when the meeting is
done that your organization can start working to meet those goals.