 We've all been in meetings that wasted our time and didn't seem to achieve anything. The average person attends 10 meetings or more per week and spends 31 hours in unproductive meetings per month. Make your meetings productive and useful for all attendees. I share 9 tips on how to run great team meetings so that you and your team can use the meeting time even more productively, get more useful actions out of the meeting and push your team's performance up another gear. My name is Jess Culls and I've spent 25 years working in corporates and household names through to SMEs at all management levels and I've attended countless meetings, run meetings from one to one and team meetings through to board meetings. A well run meeting makes a huge difference in terms of how you view the meeting but also in terms of the outputs you get from the meeting. If you're new to this channel Enhance.Training provides online business courses to help professionals, managers and business owners improve their team and business performance. And if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. So my first tip on how to run a great team meeting is to prepare a specific meeting agenda in advance and circulate to attendees. Preparing an agenda is common advice yet way too many meetings have static agendas, vague agendas or no agendas. Be clear in your own mind what the meeting is for, for instance is it information sharing or discussion and problem solving or decision making or a combination of two or more of these. Pose each agenda item as a specific question for the attendees to answer during the meeting. This ensures that they know exactly why they're there and can mentally start preparing before the meeting. Make sure all those are invited to attend will contribute to each agenda item and have input into the work being undertaken. To learn more take a look at our video on how to set a meeting agenda and there's a link above or and also in the description below. My second tip on how to run a great meeting is to agree the rules of the meeting up front with the attendees. By getting all attendees involved in setting the rules of how to behave in the meeting input by in and peer pressure helps everyone stick to them. This nearly always works better than trying to impose what you think the rules should be on the attendees because they are your rules and not theirs. Popular rules include, firstly turn up the meeting on time, second go through all the pre-reads well before the meeting, third turn your mobile phones on to silent and keep them in your pockets not on the desk, fourth only have one person talking at one time and let them finish talking before the next person starts. Fifth, follow the agenda, don't go off on tangents or ignore the time constraints. Six, allow time for questions and discussion. Try to avoid a meeting of presentations or information sharing only. And seven, attack the problem not the person. Obviously choose rules that make sense and are practical and are agreed by the team. My third tip on how to run a great meeting is to have one person in charge of facilitating the meeting. This could be you or it could be a member of the team or even a non-participating person tasked with facilitation, particularly for the larger or more formal meetings. Some of the key tasks for the person facilitating might include keeping the meeting focused on one item at a time, help everyone to participate in the meeting, for instance limiting those that talk a lot and helping the quieter members add their contribution. The facilitator could also help the group deal with conflicts and differing opinions in a constructive way. And fourth, they should clarify and summarize points to ensure everyone's understanding. Fifth, check for group members agreement and ensure clear decisions are made. And sixth, ensure action points are clear and are recorded. And for smaller and informal meetings, the meeting organizers will often take some or all of the facilitation responsibilities. My fourth tip on how to run a great team meeting is to keep the meeting focused on discussion, collaboration and problem-solving and decision-making. The quality of decision-making, in my experience, is greatly improved when each member of the team debates, challenges and probes the proposed solution or each of the possible solutions. This is very much the many minds are better than one approach. The debate in a group situation sparks new ideas and solutions as people feed off each other as well. It is much cheaper and quicker to have a proposed solution challenged from all angles while it is an idea and make changes rather than starting to implement it only to find some major problems. This is why it's so valuable to get the group together and focus on discussion, collaboration and problem-solving and decision-making. The better plans and solutions usually come from good debate and challenge. My fifth tip on how to run a great team meeting is to keep to a small number of attendees. The larger the group, in the meeting, the less participation you tend to get from those attending and the more the meeting becomes an information-sharing exercise. If you intend for the meeting to be a discussion, problem-solving and decision-making meeting, then keep the number of participants to under 10 ideally and five or under is even better. With small numbers you find a higher quality discussion and debate and quicker decision-making. My sixth tip on how to run a great team meeting is to promote openness and honesty. Being open and honest in meetings is about everyone saying what they think and feel rather than just saying what they think their boss wants to hear. For your team members to do this they need to trust you and each other. If there is a lack of trust you will struggle to get good discussion and debate which is likely to reduce the quality of decisions that are being made. There are lots of ways to build trust with team members. Some pointers include make sure you do what you say and your actions and words are consistent. Be open and honest in how you deal with your team, praise more than you criticise and ask your team members for input, actively listen and then take action on that input. You are the leader and you set the tone and the culture. My seventh tip on how to run a great team meeting is to ask for feedback on the meeting. And I know this seems like an obvious one yet very few meetings end with that two or three minutes spent on getting the team's assessment of the meeting. Here are some of the questions that you could pose to your team to get feedback on the quality of the meeting. My eighth tip on how to run a great team meeting is to capture notes all minutes of the meeting and share these. Ask a team member to take minutes or notes of what is being discussed in the meeting. This saves everyone being distracted as they write their own notes and the minutes can be shared with non attendees to help promote an open culture. Make sure the minute taker captures at least the key actions that need to be done after the meeting, who will do each action and the time frames they have to do the action. A note or minute taker helps everyone participate in the meeting much more fully. My ninth tip is focus on what to do after each meeting and that is to follow up on action items. Following up is such an important task to ensure that each action item is completed by the deadline agreed. Following up does take a bit of extra time and effort yet the benefits massively outweigh this investment. So there you have my nine tips for running effective and useful meetings at work. Many people know some or even all of this list yet don't put them into action. Don't follow their example. Put these tips into action and run better meetings. Your team and your career will thank you for it. And as always if you like this video please hit the thumbs up button below and subscribe. Thanks for watching and speak to you soon.