• Holding a meeting for 48 minutes will catch your colleagues’ attention.
• Invite fewer participants to reduce “social loafing”; encourage input before and after from “secondary stakeholders.”
• Walking and standing meetings add variety to your meeting culture and ensure that peop...

While you’re stuck with your colleagues in a meeting, you all could be spending time doing real work. When your company manages meetings effectively, meetings add to productivity and organizational cohesion. And when it doesn’t, they add to the cost. In 2014, meetings cost the United States econo...

Research shows that merely having an agenda doesn’t yield more effective meetings. Instead, be intentional in the process of creating a meeting agenda, including customizing it to meet team needs and approaching team members to ask them to add their agenda items in advance. The rule of thumb is t...

Research shows that seven participants per meeting hits the sweet spot.

With more participants, decision-making effectiveness decreases by roughly 10% per additional participant above seven. Reasons for this decrease include logistics, coordination and social issues.

How do you keep ...

Because audio-only meetings are tricky to lead, pay special attention to your format. The absence of social controls tempts participants to perform other tasks or embrace distractions while on the call – reducing meeting efficiency immensely.

To counteract those shortcomings, ban the mute ...

Many managers regard inefficient, unproductive or boring meetings as an unavoidable business flaw.

Acknowledge that meetings can cause a lot of frustration, and assess your meetings to seek improvements.

Rather than getting rid of meetings, solve your problems with them by app...

Rather than overestimating your skills, accept that you might have room for improvement, and strategically seek out opportunities to improve. You can, for example, gain input by asking meeting participants for feedback. If you feel that approaching them in person would bias the results, consider ...

Place important discussion items near the top of your agenda. The same holds true for items that participants have generated. Even if you convene the meeting, you don’t have to own every item. Increase accountability by assigning agenda items to participant-owners up front. Present the most salie...

Meetings enlivened with humour and laughter lead to more supportive team members, more constructive group dynamics and higher team performance. Negative comments lead to “mood contagion” that lowers performance. Paying attention to the emotions in your meetings is part of successful meeting leade...

“Brainwriting” – Ask meeting participants to be silent and jot down their ideas before sharing them with others. Your objective is to generate unique ideas and avoid “groupthink.”

“Silent reading” – Assign 10 to 30 minutes of silent reading for a new propos...

Everyone needs to meet for team discussions, inter-department alignment and group decision-making. But everyone needs to meet effectively. Meetings can cause frustration, especially when they waste time and energy due to a bad meeting culture.

Bad meetings should never be accepted a...

Adopt a “servant leadership” mindset and buy into an idea by Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton, that you should be a “giver” who actively assists others and disseminates knowledge without expecting anything in return. Companies with strong servant leadership and giving cultures perform better ac...

Change the seating arrangement – Actively ask participants to sit in a different seat, change the table set-up or switch to another venue.

Conduct a “walking meeting” – Take the meeting agenda and your participants outdoors or on a circular walk through your building.

Hold your meetin...

A meeting will fill in the time you allot it. When you schedule a meeting for 60 minutes, it will most likely take 60 minutes. Your tasks as a meeting leader include making a conscious choice about the meeting length. Consider your objectives, agenda items and the number of participants to determ...

Employees have no lack of cynicism when it comes to meetings. Yet getting rid of all meetings is not feasible. Without meetings, you would lose contact with your colleagues, disconnect from other departments and become single-minded about difficult problems. Rather than eliminating meetings,