Best Practices To Keep Meetings On Track

During the middle of a meeting, you will either realize that it's a productive one or it's a total waste of time. And if it's the latter,  people are much less likely to anticipate future meetings, thus making meetings less engaging and less productive over time. Nobody wants that!

I personally have experienced that with previous jobs, and one of the things I love about Mirai Consulting is how productive and engaging every one of our meetings are, no matter if it's team-based or individual-based. Today, I will share 3 of our best practices that we do at D-Squared and how you can incorporate them into your meetings.

1. Have an Agenda Ready & Track Your Time

Prior to our monthly team meeting, the meeting chair sends out a clear agenda of the topics we will discuss along with the time allotted for it. If you don't set clear intention on how long a topic will be discussed, it's most certainly going over time. As for a time tip, we always set an extra 15 to 30 minute buffer time for the end of the meeting. So for example if our meeting is between 7 to 9pm (yes we like to meet in the evenings!), we would only slot topics between 7:15 to 8:45pm. Leaving 15 minutes before and after allows flexibility in case the meeting started late and in case certain topics went over time. When we implement this, we always get out on time. Also see Bonus below.

2. Set Your Outcomes Clear

What is your theme of this meeting? What is your ultimate outcome / intention of this meeting? To inform...? To educate...? To inspire...? To update...? This isn't just an agenda of tasks and topics, rather this is a higher-level goal that we, as a team, like to accomplish. At the end of the meeting, if you can confidently say yes to "have we met our outcome for today!", then you are on the right track towards higher productivity and bringing everybody on the same page. 

Having an agenda alone isn't enough, because everyone can interpret what they feel the meeting can be about with their own expectation. By setting the outcome, everyone will know what to expect and everyone can hold each other accountable to fulfilling its intended outcome.

3. Be Wary of Transitions

Typically, leaders move from topic to topic when they are ready to, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody is ready. Before you transition from one agenda item to another, ask if everyone is finished with the current topic.

A technique I highly encourage your team to implement is to get everybody to close their eyes for a minute and perform the "Release Meditation Exercise" by Brendon Burchard. This literally takes a minute or two, and will dramatically improve your entire team's energy level and focus.

Bonus: Gratitude Round Table

As some of you already know, we are foodies at heart! We always start off our meetings with delicious food and every time is a different person that brings it to the team. Instead of just chit-chatting, we recently incorporated a gratitude round table where we would go around to everybody and they would announce what they are grateful for these past few weeks / months. By practicing gratitude, our team is able to focus on only positive shares, and thus prime everybody with positive emotions to start the meeting strong. This effectively eliminates anybody from sharing their bad day and affecting everyone else's mood. There's a place and time for those and it's not during the meeting. We usually use the 15 min buffer we mention above to share things we are grateful for and to catch each other up with personal lives.

We have a lot more best practices and we can't wait to share more with you. If you find this valuable, it would mean the world if you could share this with your teams and on social media. We would be forever grateful.

Wishing you the best of success!