I’m sure we’ve all been to meetings where little seemed to be achieved and the whole process appeared to be a general waste of everyones time.  Try following these 6 simple steps and your meetings will be transformed into productive decision making exercises.

1. Establish clear objectives prior to the meeting. Most meetings have agendas but you need to make sure that your agenda is very focused on clear tasks and deliverables.
2. Ensure the right people are present. If you need certain personnel in your meeting then make sure they are there.  It is easy now to use tools like Outlook to schedule meetings and alert participants in advance.
3. Make sure that each participant is prepared. Each participant in the meeting is there for a reason, ie to put forward views based on their expertise.  Get them to prepare properly for the meeting so that their input is precise and relevant to the objectives.
4. Use visual aids effectively. Limiting all communications to an A3 piece of paper forces participants to only use what is strictly neccessary and encourages the use of visual aids.
5. Seperate information sharing from decision making. Share information with participants before the meeting as much as possible.  This then frees up the meeting itself for problem solving and decision making.
6. Make sure that the meeting starts and ends on time.