Make the Most of Your Next Meeting

May 1, 2015

Make the Most Of Your Next Meeting

Meetings are as ubiquitous in the business world as coffee stained mugs and half-used sticky notepads. On average, there are over 25 million meetings per day in the U.S. That number adds up to 125 million meetings a week, 500 million a month, and over 6 billion a year!

While we like to think that every meeting has some point, executives consider 67% of meetings to be a failure.

Each of us can tell horror stories of real soul-crushers, but here are some of our all-time favorite types of bad meetings:

The Why Won’t He Ever Stop Talking? meeting
The Hour-Long Attempt at Setting Up an International Conference Call meeting
The Count How Many Times They Say The Word Expedite meeting
And a personal favorite: The Meeting to Set Up Another Meeting meeting

Surprisingly, your soul might not be the only thing these types of meetings are crushing. According to data assembled by Inc.com, unproductive meetings are likely hurting your company’s bottom line more than you know. It is estimated that 15% of any organization’s collective time is spent in unproductive meetings, resulting in a loss of $37 billion nationally each year. That’s a whole lot of time and money spent with nothing to show for it.

Consider these simple ways to make sure your company doesn’t fall deeper into these statistics:

Decide if the meeting is absolutely necessary or if there is a more efficient way to accomplish what needs to be done
Keep meetings to 30 minutes max
Have a clear agenda and stick to it – No monologues!
Be clear about who really needs to be in attendance and who does not
Use video instead of phone calls to increase engagement with members outside of the meeting

Meetings are an unavoidable necessity for any successful business. Let’s make a point to start making the most of them! Why not start by having a productive meeting with the digital marketers at Brandography? Come tour our Minneapolis marketing agency and see how our team of professional web developers and digital marketing specialists can help your business with search engine optimization, website design, and much more!