Another 7 ways to increase meeting productivity.

It’s common knowledge that meetings are costly. Time is valuable and assembling a large group in one place is expensive by any definition. The financial impact of upsetting the workday rhythm is even costlier, and small businesses are hit hardest.

Some people are at their most productive at the beginning of the day, greeting the morning’s tasks with immediate energy. Others (myself included) may need about an hour of preparation before they’re ready to get moving. When a meeting begins, however, personal wants and needs fall by the wayside. Meetings force us to relinquish one of the basic components of any creative task: autonomy.

There’s no way to do away with meetings altogether. Admittedly, a meeting’s benefits sometimes outweigh its drawbacks. There’s no question, however, that a more intelligent approach is possible.

Let’s look at some ideas for meeting effectively picked up from highly productive workplace teams:

• Steer Clear of “Informational Meetings”: If a meeting ends without action steps, then the meeting’s necessity – especially if it’s a regularly scheduled event — requires questioning. A group gathering simply to update information is better handled via voice-mail or e-mail.
• Kick the Monday Meeting Habit: Meeting just because it’s Monday is a purely nonsensical practice. It’s time better spent tackling that overstuffed inbox. Almost always, regularly set meetings turn into “posting” sessions.
• Conclude with a Rundown of Captured Action Steps: As every meeting wraps up, do a quick check of the “action steps” captured by each employee. The practice takes less than half-a-minute per attendee and will almost always uncover several neglected action items, as well as fostering a greater awareness of accountability. Once announced to the room, effectively completing an action step is much more likely.
• Classify All Meetings as “Standing”: A smart idea I saw in some groups was the idea of a “standing meeting” – literally. In these, employees would remain standing throughout, removing the relaxation element which fills “sitting” meetings with unnecessary repetition and commentating instead of content-creating. Standing meetings are more action-oriented; people get to the point more quickly when they’re feeling weak in the knees.
• The former chief of MTV Digital Media and current MySpace Music topper, Courtney Holt, swears by standing meetings’ positive effect on his employees. “I try to make every meeting – especially those that are called last-minute – a standing meeting, ideally each meeting finishes as quickly as it can.”
• Most last-minute meetings, usually to quickly get the team up to speed or handle a problem situation, can take place in under 10 minutes.
• Clarify Every Meeting’s Purpose at its Start: Brittany Ancell, chief of operations for Behance, advises beginning all meetings with a basic question: “Why are we here, and what are we supposed to accomplish?” As she elaborates, “Laying out the objective and setting the meeting’s tone is one of the leader’s key responsibilities.”
• Reestablish Transit Time: Accounting for travel time between meetings of 10 or 15 minutes helps substantially lower anxiety. In the Harvard Business Review, David Silverman, a business writing instructor and entrepreneur, effectively argues that, as grade-schoolers, we knew the school bell signified 15 minutes until our next period. “Why is it,” he wonders, “that when we graduate, they take away our bells, replace them with an irritating ‘doink’ sound signaling ‘5 minutes until your next meeting’ and assume we can now teleport to the location of same? What could cause such madness? In two words: Microsoft Outlook.” It appears that the basic philosophy of corporate time-keeping has stolen that much-needed sanity-preserver – travel time – from daily schedules. For a return to sanity, Silverman proposes scheduling hour-long meetings but limiting them to no longer than 50 minutes.
• Schedule Unavoidable Meetings for 3:00 PM, Tuesday: In a Lifehacker article, online scheduling service “When is Good” reported that, upon studying more than 100,000 replies to 34,000 invites on their site, they concluded that the time with the most “availability” for participants was 3:00PM on Tuesday. The results imply that there are probably specific times of day (and days of the week) which are the most convenient for all involved, in spite of personal work-flow differences. It’s far from a scientific conclusion, but it’s a result worth noting.

Respected employers acknowledge that determining a meeting’s worth is important. While researching for my blog, I noticed that the highest-achieving teams and bosses were, more often than not, inclined to view most potential meetings with a healthy helping of skepticism. The tips outlined above offer an easy way to protect your small business from the resource-wasting and time-consuming danger of unnecessary meetings.

Up Next: “Getting the Most out of Conferences”