When strategic planning for any organization, meetings are arranged in different ways. Yet, however, they’re scheduled, ensuring that those meetings take place is still essential in order to fulfill your company’s objectives and goals. The key is to ensure that meetings are productive and non-time-wasting.

All-too-often, companies arrange meetings without planning effectively how the time will be spent. This results in pointless meetings that lack purpose and achieve little or nothing of importance. So, how can this be prevented in your organization?

Saying No To Meetings

If your calendar is constantly overflowing with scheduled meetings, it’s likely that you’re working in an organization that has a pro-meeting culture. This isn’t unusual. It also isn’t unusual to accept an invitation to a meeting even if you know already that attending it will achieve little and may even be counter-productive. Yet, this isn’t a positive culture for your company. Promoting a healthier attitude towards meetings is, therefore, important. Every team member should be thinking critically before sending or accepting a meeting invite about whether the meeting needs to take place at all, and if it does, who really needs to attend.

If you check out our Global Resources reviews, you’ll see that companies can revolutionize their operations simply by beginning to think more critically about their meeting culture. By simply making a rule that each meeting has to have an arranged agenda, it becomes easier for invited participants to check to see if their presence is necessary or not. It also creates a positive cycle during which those organizing meetings must think about what needs to be accomplished and articulate the agenda clearly before commencing the meeting.

Tracking The Results Of Meetings

While adding a pre-arranged agenda into every meeting goes a long way towards measuring improvement, this isn’t usually enough. Meetings aren’t valuable in themselves. Only the results of the meetings have value. You should, therefore, implement a general rule that each meeting should result in an action item, whether that be a meeting summary, a follow-up survey or a list of items to action afterward.

Reforming Your Company’s Meeting Culture

With a reformed meeting culture in your organization, it’s possible to achieve more and to see positive results quickly. It needn’t be difficult to implement change in this respect. By following the tips suggested here, you’ll find that it’s easier than you imagined to eliminate unproductive and time-wasting meetings from your schedule and to, instead, only arrange meetings that have a recognized agenda, that are useful and relevant to the company’s goals and that have results that are properly followed up afterward.

The Global Resources LLC team is on hand to offer their advice and consultancy services to any company wanting to reform their organization’s meeting culture. Our experienced business and management consultants can offer you all the help you need to give the structure of your meetings an overhaul and to ensure that only the most vital personnel are invited to attend the most relevant meetings in the future.