Are you attending too many? are they a total waste of time?, or do you think they are an effective way to communicate to large groups and a good opportunity of team members to get to know each other more?

Businesspeople attend billions of meetings each year. The cost of these meetings is enormous. Even the cost of conducting a day-long meeting with 10 staff members is high. In addition to the meeting room, coffee, meals, travel, and audio-visual equipment, you have to add the cost of staff members pulled away from their jobs. For this reason alone, meetings need to make good use of everyone's time.

Meetings if poorly run can be a complete waste of time, especially if there are too many meetings, with too many participants and when the meeting itself has no real purpose they can run for longer than scheduled and become a platform for talkative people and few right decisions come out of them and they can even complicate straightforward issues.

On the other hand, meetings if they are run effectively can be an effective means to:

- Communicate to a group
- Meeting people face-to-face
- Improving the quality of decisions
- Getting to know people
- Drawing from a variety of different experiences and backgrounds
- A great team building tool

General Guidelines for holding effective meetings

- Do not hold a meeting simply for the sake of it.

- Meetings should begin and end on time.

- Meetings must have a complete meeting agenda that is circulated in advance to all participants.

- Invite only people who need to be there and have input to the agenda.

- Jobs must be assigned to the meeting participants , for example someone to take notes, someone to make sure we are following the agenda ...etc.

- Setting ground rules at the beginning of the meeting is also very helpful in getting consensus about the timings, topics to start with and the order of speaking ..etc.

- Remember that arriving more than 10 minutes early can be considered a breach of privacy if it's in someone's office. - If you can’t help being late? Make a serious effort to phone ahead and let people know. - When you do miss a meeting, make a point of apologizing forthrightly, rather than making excuses.

- Learn strategies for redirecting colleagues who go off on tangents during meetings.

Goodluck on your next meeting!

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