Purposeful meetings can bring your team together — especially when you plan ahead and make productivity a priority. If you're looking for a new approach, consider these best practices for productive meetings that will truly benefit your team.

1. Change Your Mindset

As a meeting organizer, think about how you can make the meeting beneficial for yourself and your employees. When you adopt this mindset, your employees will recognize it and bring their best contributions to meetings in turn.

You can also work to change employee mindset by introducing fun and creative elements to a meeting. Employees sometimes come to meetings with a negative attitude, especially if they're used to a similar format and location every time. Find new ways for everyone to engage with the material at hand.

2. Consider Meeting Times

When planning a meeting, don't block it off in your calendar for an hour if that's not the amount of time you'll need. Think about the agenda of the meeting and how much time it will take to cover all the points, then block off that amount of time, whether it be 10 minutes or 40. 

It's also important to be prompt when starting meetings. Employees will enjoy meetings more when they begin on time with a clear purpose.

3. Organize Meeting Information

Another way to increase meeting productivity is to plan the action items you want to cover and write up an agenda. A schedule will help you and your team work through the material systematically and quickly.

After the meeting, organize any information or documents to send to participants to follow up. Meeting notes will help ensure any action items discussed in the meeting get done before the next one. Notes also serve as a record to keep everyone on the same page.

4. Let Various People Lead

Another tip for improving meeting productivity is to change up the host. If a particular employee has specific insight or knowledge that would benefit the area of discussion, let them lead the meeting. Letting multiple people lead allows for better engagement from other employees because it makes a meeting feel more like a discussion. It also helps to improve leadership skills among your team.

5. Hold Your Meeting at a Unique Venue

The last secret to more productive meetings is to choose a unique location. Nook Meetings & Events has 700,000 square feet of flexible meeting space you can use for intimate brainstorming sessions along with conventions and trade shows of any size.

Contact us to request more information and book a space for your next meeting or corporate event!