Meetings have a bad reputation in today’s businesses for one simple reason: most of them are ineffective and their main result is the wasting of time. It is estimated that the average employee wastes more than 30 hours a month on unproductive meetings; its overall cost would exceed 800,000 million euros a year. Most of these meetings are boring and lack a structure encouraging decision making. But it needn’t be like that. Meetings are necessary and can be a stimulating, useful and productive tool for businesses.
Marissa Mayer, current president and CEO of Yahoo, calls an average of 70 meetings a week. Structuring these meetings and making use of new technologies in them is vital to make the most out of available time and get the best out of each meeting. These are Mayer’s three keys to run a meeting effectively:
1. Defining an agenda in advance
Mayer sets an agenda for the meeting in advance. It outlines what participants want to discuss and the time allotted to expose the issues and topics. This agenda has some flexibility, but it is basically used as a tool to commit people to think about what they want to achieve in the meeting. It is a way of focusing on the goal which needs to be achieved and the most effective way to do it.
This piece of advice from Mayer is precisely an essential feature included in the Brilliant Meeting application, which emphasizes the setting of an agenda beforehand so as to lead participants through the objectives and topics to be discussed. Before each meeting, the manager can edit the time allotted to each participant, establish the order of participation (thus promoting prioritization of the most urgent and relevant points), send invitations, etc.
2. Assign someone the task of taking notes
You don’t need to be a giant like Yahoo to use audiovisual material in meetings. Most companies use presentations on screens and projectors for better conveying ideas. For them not to be all in vain, the best practice is to facilitate note taking so everything can be reviewed later and it is easier to know what actions to take and how to get to work. If we previously assign someone the task of taking notes, we will make our meetings more productive.
With Brilliant Meeting, each participant can add notes, tasks, attachments and comments, making the process faster and subsequently facilitating decision-making.
3. Time is money
Marissa Mayer knows the importance of “timing” meetings to better structure and organize its topics. A timer places a subtle pressure on the meeting so that the calculation of spent and remaining time for each participant is provided. It is easier to end meetings on time when you have control over their duration.
Timing is another key aspect of Brilliant Meeting. This gamified application has a chronometer and a countdown and, when the time previously set by the person in charge has elapsed, an alarm sets off. This, besides estimating the time and cost of the meeting, turns the end of each intervention into a friendly reminder, avoiding the uncomfortable task of interrupting participants (who will see the reminder themselves on the screen). The user who meets schedules and planning will get points and clear levels to become the “guru” of meetings of the company.
Besides all these suggestions for managing meetings effectively, Brilliant Meeting, developed by Gamelearn, provides feedback and measures the performance of participants, automatically generating and sending the reports at the end of the meeting and providing recommendations to save costs and time in the organization.
To celebrate the launch of Brilliant Meeting, you can get the app for free for one month. Take the opportunity to test such a tool and tell us how you managed to improve your productivity. You can already run a meeting effectively. And don’t forget your feedback!
