Fix your Meetings with these 9 tips in 2023.

Business meetings are incredibly important, but also way too expensive. What can you do to curb costs while ensuring teams stay connected, productive and moving initiatives along in the New Year? Below we review our favorite meeting improvement hacks for 2023. (Read to the end to see a list of tools that can help).

1. Make agendas great again.‍

Create an agenda & give people time to review it before the meeting. No agenda = No meeting.

2. Clean up your invite lists.‍

Only invite people who are essential to the live conversation, and offer ways for the rest of your team to provide input when they are available. (Following the RACI model can help here).

3. Start every meeting with an objective and desired outcome.‍

“The objective of today’s meeting is (blank).”

“The outcome we’re driving towards is (blank).”

4. Formalize where post-meeting activity happens.‍

Email, Slack, Miro, Confluence….choose one and stick to it!

5. Try adding some “async” meeting plugins into your workflow.‍

There’s lots of tools out there that can help you speed up pre and post meeting activities. Here’s a few tools that can help your team be more efficient:

• Calendly (for bookings)
• Doodle (for group scheduling)
• Loom (for screen recording)
• Todoist (for task lists)
• Evernote (for notes)

6. Treat follow-ups like you’re marketing to your team.‍

Stop waiting too long to engage employees after a meeting. And stop engaging them immediately after the meeting. (Studies show that waiting 24–48 hours for meeting follow-up can prevent meeting fatigue.)

7. Create a meeting sequence for projects, sales calls and client cadences.‍

The majority of business meetings will require multiple meetings to reach a desired end-result. Try mapping out a calendar of meetings ahead of time that help you chart your key project milestones.

8. Conduct a meeting audit.‍

Decide which meetings are essential, and when is the best time to hold them. Purge the ones that provide little value to the team & design a new meeting framework moving forward. Click here to book a FREE Meeting Audit from Reelay.

9. Design your meeting stack, then try to make it interoperable.‍

One of the biggest issues we see plaguing corporations is the sheer number of disconnected systems that are being used to manage daily company communication and meetings. Info from your meetings is coming from, and going into too many tools! Does this list look familiar?

• Video conferencing (Zoom, Meet, Teams, Ring Central…)
• Chat (Slack, Teams, Discord…)
• File sharing/storage (Box, Dropbox, Drive, Sharepoint…)
• Task management (Too many to list)
• Project management (Also, too many to list)
• Employee training/coaching (Lattice, etc.)
• Email (Gmail, Outlook, Superhuman…)
• Calendar (Google, Outlook…)
• Notes (Who knows!)
• Scheduling (Calendly, Doodle, etc.)
• Collaboration (Miro, Notion, etc.)
• CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, etc.)

We’ll review each of these concepts further over the coming weeks, but feel free to comment and share in the meantime. Happy Meeting!