10 ways to turbo-charge your meetings

Sarah Stowe

How many times have you wanted to stand up and leave a group ‘touch base’ after 15 minutes? Corinne Canter, senior leadership and culture expert at Human Synergisitcs, wants you to stop losing hundreds of hours to unproductive meetings.

Here are her top 10 tips to boost meeting efficiencies.

Top 10 tips for effective team meetings

1. Be deliberate in designing the team so that it’s set up for success right from the start. Ensure that the work is suited to team work, that there is some level of collaboration and interdependence needed to achieve a common goal.

2. Be clear about your expectations and how you’ll measure the team’s performance and success.

3. Establish a shared understanding and compelling team purpose or better still involve team members in establishing this purpose.

4. Conduct a ‘kick off’ or launch workshop with the team to discuss and agree on a charter that outlines team members agreement as to:

  • Purpose
  • Values and behaviour (during and outside team meetings)
  • Roles and responsibilities
  • Ways of working

5. Provide coaching and regular feedback to team members and encourage feedback between peers as to ‘what’s working’ and ‘what needs work’.

6. Involve team members in determining criteria that guides which issues need collective problem solving and decision making vs individual problem solving independent of team input.

7. Make it a priority for team members to collaborate on cross functional issues so that they have the opportunity to collaborate regularly.

8. Create opportunities for team members to get to know each other better in more relaxed and informal settings. Increasing familiarity with each other’s preferences can build trust.

9. Make time at the end of each meeting to evaluate how effective the meeting and conversations were. ‘Did we have the conversation that mattered?’, ‘Did we discuss things effectively?’. Using a tool to do this will help provide a consistent standard against which the team can judge its development.

10. Celebrate successes and milestones achieved.