planning a business meeting

Meetings are an essential business process. Well run meetings contribute to team building and high morale; badly run meetings are at best a waste of everyone's time and at worst potentially damaging to relationships and the business as a whole.

Prepare an agenda that spends time based on the value of the expected results. Determine the results that you want, estimate their value, and then allocate appropriate amounts of time in the agenda. You want to run your meeting like a small business, which means you design the process to earn a profit on your investment.

You need planning to a meeting. The people who attened the meeting, what is the meeting you intened to achieve, the time and place of the meeting. Prepare and circulate an agenda in advance. Arrange the timings and set limits. Record discussions, actions and responsibilities. Clarify objectives for each item. Keep the meeting brief.

If you have scheduled a one hour meeting and you are finished in fifteen minutes, that is perfectly fine. Do not drag out the meeting. Sometimes there are major decisions that may require more than an hour for a meeting. These meetings should be the exception, not the rule.