Five tips on effective time management of team meetings

Team meetings. Many employees (and team managers) are not great fans of them. This is frequently because the meetings are poorly led: they often overrun, with too much time spent on one point, and thus most of the meeting fails to relate at all to many of the participants. Although successful leadership of meetings is a complex topic, this article will at least look at one aspect: time management. Here are five tips on how to plan, schedule and lead a meeting with your team.

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These tips were published by the Management Issues website.

Make a time schedule

This sounds obvious, but the most essential tip is actually to make a schedule for every meeting. This does not mean merely stating that the meeting will take hour and the topics you want to cover; rather, you should write for each point how much time you intend to spend on it and then properly adhere to this schedule during the meeting itself.

Consult the schedule of regular meetings with team members

If you hold regular or repeated meetings, do not rely solely on your own judgement; discuss the schedule with team members too. They might have useful comments and insights that have not occurred to you.

Check whether everybody really needs to be present the whole time

Many managers force team members to sit through the whole meeting even if most of the topics do not concern them. Evaluate whether it is really necessary that all team members be present throughout the meeting. If not, you can divide the meeting into smaller, more intensive sessions that only the relevant people will participate in.

Start with priority points

Let's be honest: the situation when you are running out of time at the end of the meeting and have to omit some points will always arise. This is why it is necessary you put the most important points at the top of the agenda and only then move on to less urgent issues.

Assign someone to monitor the time during the meeting

It is always good to assign someone the task of keeping an eye on the time and reminding participants they are behind schedule and should move on to the next point. It is also advisable that this is not the same person who is managing the meeting because the manager must focus primarily on other things.

 

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Article source Management Issues - British website cntaining practical information, tips and advice to managers
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