Create fun, productive, and successful meetings

Hate meetings? Here are some ways to make them more productive, efficient, and fun.

Boring, brain-numbing, a waste of time and energy. Does this sound like some meetings you've been to recently? Whether you're meeting in person or remotely, dull, ineffective meetings do more than waste time-they lower your participant's morale.

Create fun, productive, and successful meetings that your participants will actually look forward to by trying the following techniques.

Become a meeting specialist
You may know how to run a business effectively, but your meetings could be another story. Local consulting firms, business schools, and adult education schools offer classes to improve facilitation skills for the designated meeting specialists in your company.

Throw away the agenda
Your agenda may look great on paper, but once the meeting gets rolling it can get stale-fast. Be sure to give living, breathing idea generation precedent over a bulleted list. If you don't get to a point this week, it will always be there next time.

Encourage healthy competition
While name-calling should be off-limits, a little competition can keep participants on their toes. Try a weekly quiz based on random sources such as sales reports, industry trends, and company-wide announcements. Be sure to post results for participants can track their progress against their co-workers.

Make your participants engage
Yes-men and women waste everyone's time. Try sending out a topical question to your participants ahead of the meeting to stir their ideas. Also try throwing out problems to smaller groups (using the subconference feature in BT Event Call) who will discuss for 10 minutes and report their findings back to the main group.

Discourage random acts of chatter
Watch how quickly your participants get to the point when the meeting is at 5pm on a Friday! If you have participants who love to explore tangents, a meeting scheduled in time-sensitive slots can be a great way to firm up the discussion and increase its productivity.

See the future
Many meetings are rooted firmly in the past-rehashing past accomplishments and failures. Pay careful attention to what tense your verbs are in-past, present, or future. Try being forward-thinking in meetings, and watch your participants do the same.

End on a high note
Learn how to recognize and seize the high point of your presentation or meeting, and then end it there. By ending your meeting on a climax, you leave your participants interested and excited by your message, and probably happy to leave the meeting early.