Almost any satire about the world of work will involve an awful meeting. And with good reason. Ask most people what they hate about their jobs, and meetings will come up. They’ll moan about spending hours in overly hot or cold rooms, colleagues who will not stop talking, wasted time, and so on. But most people consider meetings vital to doing business. So, how do you make them work for you and your team?
Prepare to succeed
Before you call the meeting, sit down (possibly with other key stakeholders) and think about what you want to accomplish. Why are you having the meeting, who should be there, and what do you want to get out of it? Do you even need to have it? Ensuring you are clear about the purpose of the meeting will make everything that follows easier.
Have an agenda
One of the great problems with meetings is that they allow people to talk at length about what interests them. This is easy to combat. If you’re running the meeting, have an agenda. Having done your preparation will help you write it, and it can be as prescriptive or loose as required. The point is that you limit the scope of the meeting — and if it’s not on the agenda, you don’t talk about it. If necessary, you can have five minutes for “any other business” at the end. But make sure attendees know it’s only five minutes. Email the agenda to attendees a couple of days before the meeting, so that they can prepare (and also so they know what it isn’t about).
Think, too, about when you hold meetings. First thing on Mondays and last thing on Fridays may not be good times for obvious reasons. However, mid-mornings are good, especially if the meeting ends for lunch. This leaves the afternoon free for work but lets people do their “first thing” tasks. Obviously, you should fit around as many people’s schedules as possible — and AI can help you find times that work for everyone (or at least most people).
Have a chair
You need someone to police the agenda. This is the chair and will probably be you if you called the meeting. You don’t need to formally “be” the chair; you just need people to know that you’re responsible for running the meeting. When people run over time, you should prompt them to wrap up their point, and if they digress or start hobby horsing, you need to steer them back onto the agenda. Conversely, you’ll want to invite people who are reticent to speak if they’d like to. You want a meeting where everyone feels that their voice has been heard.
Consider a meeting record
Not every meeting requires minutes, but important ones do. It’s very useful to have a record of what was discussed and agreed. The good news here is that AI transcription apps have made taking minutes vastly easier. Instead of having to take notes yourself, you can have a transcript with an AI-generated summary within a few minutes after the meeting finishes. At the beginning of the next meeting, you can refer back to it to check you’re on track and progress is being made as agreed.
Keep it small
Meeting bloat is a terrible thing. People are invited to meetings that they don’t need (or want) to attend and then cause the meetings to drag on because they feel they have to contribute. So, keep meetings small. Build them from zero attendees up, inviting only those who need to be there. If you’re doing this for the first time, people may feel left out or FOMO, so explain your new meeting regime. Say something like, “James, you’re not at this meeting because it only concerns the project Claire, Ravi, and Jenn are working on. I know you’re busy and I don’t want to waste your time — you and Hassan will be having a separate meeting in a week’s time.”
Limit time
If limiting numbers is one key to meeting efficiency, another is limiting time. You can be quite brutal here. How long did the last meeting take? Two hours? Why not see if you can do the next meeting in one? Or even 30 minutes? Strictly limiting time also gives the chair considerable polite ammunition when it comes to curtailing those who like the sound of their own voice. You just tell the loquacious individual that there’s only 15 minutes left and four items of agenda to still get through, so they’ll need to wrap up. Some people take this to extremes with five-minute meets or stand-up only meetings. You don’t have to go this far, but as a rule, shorter is better.
Mix it up and make it nice
An evergreen complaint about meetings is they’re held in stuffy rooms that induce sleep. So don’t do this. Hold them in pleasant areas (contemporary office design with break-out and communal areas makes this easier). If you’re on a campus, hold meetings outside in good weather. In a city, hold them in a park. Make an effort to make them less boring and more inspiring. In a similar vein, for meetings of any length, you should provide drinks and snacks (not just tea and coffee, but healthy options, too). For very long meetings, you might even have a break in the middle or serve lunch.
Mixed or hybrid meetings are perhaps the hardest — they feel like neither one thing nor the other, and not everyone is equal. Unless you have a room designed for them, the best way of running these meetings can be to use a speaker and microphone but not a screen (so you avoid physical attendees having to huddle around a laptop). Here, as chair, you should ensure that remote staff are prompted to contribute as fully as possible.
Make sure you finish well
Always wrap up at the end of the meeting. If you’re the chair, this is your job. Summarise the points discussed and outline the actions that each person has agreed as a result of the meeting (if you leave anything out, you can follow up more fully on this by email after you’ve seen the meeting summary). And thank everyone for coming. Finally, on the off chance you finish your agenda early, finish the meeting early. Nobody is ever unhappy to get out of a meeting ten minutes before the end.
Rhymer Rigby is a business writer and columnist. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Oliver Rowe at Oliver.Rowe@aicpa-cima.com.
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“Virtual Meetings Not Expected to Replace Business Travel”, FM magazine, 2 July 2025
“10 Tips to Overcome Meeting Anxiety”, FM magazine, 21 November 2024