As of: March 28, 2024, 12:00 p.m
By: Marco Blanco Ucles
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Meetings are an integral part of the working world these days - they are often time-consuming. Five tips can increase productivity.
Many people in the working world would probably close their laptop again in the morning when they looked at their appointment calendar. One meeting follows the next. Not every employee always understands the purpose of attending certain meetings. Schedules often cannot be adhered to. Annoyed and unfocused participants are usually the result.
Meetings that last too long: employees lack time for other tasks
The excess minutes are then missed at other points in everyday working life and this creates stress for the employees. With five tips, meetings can be made more productive - the company and employees benefit equally.
Long meetings can get on your last nerve – and cost an enormous amount of time. However, with a few tips you can significantly increase the productivity of meetings. (Symbolic image) © Panthermedia/IMAGO
1. Preparation is key
If a large number of participants only find out what it's about in the meeting, this automatically delays productivity. That's why it's always advisable as an organizer to send out an agenda in advance and ask colleagues to think about certain topics. This means that the topic doesn't have to be explained in detail at the beginning of the meeting, but rather it gets straight to the nitty-gritty.
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2. Select participants specifically
As a meeting participant, you often ask yourself: “What am I even doing here?” This especially happens when the organizer invites a large part of the team without considering who can give input to the meeting. This also applies if there are several agenda items that do not necessarily fit together thematically: “If a schedule is available and reliable, participants can also specifically move on to the agenda items that are relevant to them,” advises
Wirtschaftswoche
. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is often quoted in this context. He once said that there can only be enough participants in a meeting to eat two pizzas.
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3. Question the purpose of the meeting carefully
In 2023, Microsoft
published
the so-called “Work Trend Index”. Among other things, it was about what inhibits the productivity of employees. Unsurprisingly, the number one ranking was that employees had too many inefficient meetings. The third-ranking barrier, according to the survey, is that employees have too many meetings. That's why
Metafinanz
advises
organizers to ask themselves the following four questions before scheduling a meeting with colleagues:
Do I need outside input to make progress?
Have I thought through the situation?
Does this require an in-person meeting?
Do I need a synchronous conversation to move forward?
4. Keep the length of the meeting short
If at all possible, meetings in which you should definitely avoid certain formulations should not last for hours. The reason is simple: a person's attention span is limited.
explains that the average attention span today is 90 seconds to 7 minutes depending on generation and topic. Keep this in mind when building the agenda. After 45 minutes the first low occurs and after 90 minutes the air is finally gone. At least then there should be at least a longer break.
5. Other devices stay off in the meeting
Participants in a meeting often drift off mentally. Then it is not uncommon for them to start using other electronic devices such as their laptop or smartphone. Of course, this harms individual productivity. Therefore, it must normally be clear: In a personal meeting, no one other than the presenter and the person taking the minutes should have a laptop in front of them. Your eyes and thoughts should be completely focused on the current topic.