 the dreaded team meeting, how we love to attend them, but even worse, how we love to plan and prepare to host one. I'm going to give you some tips on how to host a productive and engaging team meeting. All attended those internal team meetings where things never really get discussed and action items are never really pushed forward. It could be because there wasn't enough planning put into motion before the meeting actually took place. So we're going to look at some things that we can do as meeting planners to create an agenda and create an engagement for our attendees so that when they walk into that meeting room, they're actually walking out with something tangible. So here we go. These are my tips for creating a productive team meeting. Tip number one, use Doodle to schedule your team meeting. There's a lot of scheduling tools out there. Doodle is just one of them. It's one that when you send out different meeting, potential meeting times to your delegates, they can confirm that they can attend that particular meeting. This saves a lot of that email, be CCing and CCing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, trying to find a time that works for all of your attendees to do a meeting. So try Doodle the next time that you schedule a team meeting. My advice with Doodle is ensure that you confirm your meeting maximum two days after you send out the Doodle so that people can lock down that time in their calendars. Tip number two, create an agenda. I can't tell you how many team meetings I've been asked to attend that doesn't have an agenda. I want you to be more protective of your time and be more respectful of your attendees' time as well. By creating an agenda and showing them right on there what the mission statement is and what the action items they're going to take away from that meeting. By creating an agenda you're going to create buy-in from your attendees. You're going to allow them to prepare for the meeting and it will decrease time in the meeting spent trying to figure out what the agenda is. Tip number three, define your mission statement. I alluded to this in tip number two and basically what you're telling your attendees is what is the focus of this meeting? What is the goal and the objective of this meeting? What are we going to take away at the end of this meeting? So that keeps people focused in the meeting, it keeps people focused before the meeting because they know what they're walking into and so you'll get their best attention and their best productivity. Tip number four, make a majority of the meeting about action-oriented items. For those informational items that can be read off of a PowerPoint or read off of a Word document those can be distributed through email and gives you all the time in the meeting of going over those things. Try to make a majority of the meeting time about how to push projects forward with the information that they've been given in advance. Tip number five, eliminate items that only require one to two people. When you have a room of engaged people the worst thing you can do is make an action item just about one person in the room. Not only does that put that person in the spotlight and they may not be comfortable but now you've just drained the energy from the room from all the people that were engaged and ready to tackle the things that affect their job and their responsibilities. So those one-on-one conversations you can certainly say to people in the room hey, we have something to talk about but it only affects you, let's take it offline and get back to the focus of the agenda. That's perfectly fine, then that person knows yes, we need to talk about something offline and we can focus at that time on that piece of the project but now you're bringing the group back in as a whole and you can tackle the rest of the agenda together. Tip number six, try not to overuse PowerPoint. Now PowerPoint is a great tool for highlighting bullet points or highlighting action-oriented statements but if it's informational only those are things that could have been sent in advance of the meeting and drawing the energy of the room to focus on a slide takes away from bringing you guys all together as a group anyway. So try to minimize your use of PowerPoint and make it to punctuate really important points instead. Tip number seven, create pre-meeting homework. Now I alluded to this with tip number six and the PowerPoint. If you need to get a lot of information about the projects at hand out in advance PowerPoint or Word is a great way to do that via email in advance of the meeting. Again, that puts a majority of your meeting time on the action-oriented statements but also creates buy-in for the meeting because they won't be wasting their time in the beginning of the meeting reading all of that pre-homework. Make it an expectation that they should address the homework before arriving at the meeting and then through bullet points just address some of the highlights of the things that they have read in advance. Tip number eight, manage the technology. If you don't have a technology guideline in place already for your internal team meetings, now's a great time to start. So perhaps your team members know they cannot bring phones into the room or their laptops and if their laptops are there that the email is turned off or it could be vice versa. Perhaps you're in a working environment where you need your team to be reactionary to when things are incoming. Make those expectations clear at the beginning of the meeting about how people are going to rule their technology when they're in the meeting. Of course, you're going to have a more productive team meeting if the technology's turned off for the time being but again, given your industry and your market you may have to make some allowances. Tip number nine, effective facilitation. Now this is your job as the meeting planner and the meeting host to facilitate the room and make sure that people stay on topic. If they start to veer off, then you need to bring them back around to the topic, bring them back around to that mission statement that you've stated at the beginning of the meeting. You're going to get through your meeting agenda faster, you're going to keep people engaged longer. So manage those squirrels in the room, make sure you stay on topic through effective facilitation. Tip number 10, be selective about your weekly team meetings. Now I know a number of teams have weekly team meetings that provide updates or state of the union. Be selective though about what those team meetings look like on a weekly basis. Again, you're trying to be protective of your own time but also be respectful of your colleague's time. If you're potentially taking them away from projects that they are moving forward because though they're stuck in a weekly team meeting, that's just a standing appointment on their calendar, you're not being respectful of their most productive time. So be selective with the team meetings that you're going to hold on a weekly basis and again, make sure those weekly team meetings follow all of the nine steps that I've outlined above. I can understand some of these tips are not conventional in your current work setting but I do challenge you to look at the team meetings that you're hosting now and seeing if there are ways to make them more productive and more importantly, more engaging. So I hope you enjoyed these tips on how to make your next team meeting more productive and I wish you all the best. For more productivity tips, check out my website at productivitypantry.com. There you can sign up for my newsletter and receive a worksheet that helps you self-evaluate on how to make better choices with your time. Have a great week and we'll see you later. Bye for now.