5 Tips for More Productive Meetings

Everyone has opinions about meetings: why some meetings aren’t necessary at all, what makes them needlessly long, and so on. But it’s not hard to improve meetings. With minimal preparation and forethought, meetings can be more productive for everyone.

- JILL DUFFY

One key to holding better meetings is to identify what kind of meeting you intend to hold, then prepare for it accordingly.

4 KINDS OF MEETINGS

The most common meetings fall into four types: informational, discussion and collaboration, check-in, and working meeting.

1. Informational: This type of meeting is used to disseminate information. Semiannual town-hall meetings are typically informational. A PR briefing is likely informational. Usually, only one party has information to share, and the attendees are there to absorb it.

2. Discussion and Collaboration: As one example, brainstorms are discussion or collaboration meetings. Information is meant to come from multiple people. Collaborative meetings can also be problem-solving meetings. In this kind of meeting, one or more of the parties involved could set the agenda.

3. Check-in: This is a regularly scheduled meeting, usually around a particular project, which could be ongoing or have an anticipated completion date. A daily scrum is an example of a check-in meeting. Check-ins are good for making sure everyone involved in some kind of work or a project are kept up to date on problems, solutions, changes, progress, and so forth. Regular check-ins can be (but don’t have to be) very short, especially when there are few or no changes since the last meeting.