Sometimes it seems as if we’re always meeting. We have our regular monthly organization meetings, special task force meetings to work on, urgent actions, and committee meetings for projects our group has taken on. Meetings take up so much of our time because they’re the way we make our decisions, plan our actions, and move the work we are doing along.

Every business, whether it has 2 employees or 2,000, has meetings as a regular part of getting things done. Meetings can be useful. Meetings are excellent places to deliver information to a large group of people. Delivering this information collectively to the group helps ensure all people get the same information at the same time. This will help reduce the spread of rumors and also reduces the amount of time that might be spent delivering the information to individuals or smaller groups.

But how many of us hate meetings? Meetings can sometimes be so ineffective that people think of them as four-letter words, with a few extra letters thrown in. We all have memories of meetings that seem to last forever and no decisions ever get made. Someone kept interrupting and moving everyone off of the agenda, the chair had too many of her own opinions, the meeting ran overtime, and by the time it was over, everyone went home or back to work tired and unsatisfied. Sound familiar?

Why are there so many bad meetings? Typically, they neither have clearly defined purposes, a clear agenda, nor effectively engage participants in a process to resolve the problems at hand. If you pay attention and prepare properly you can avoid the meeting killers like: wasting meeting time; wasting people’s time; boring meetings that go nowhere; and meetings for meeting’s sake. The processes used for a meeting depends on the kind of meeting you plan to have, e.g., staff meeting, planning meeting, problem solving meeting, etc. However, there are certain basics that are common to all types of meetings. Let’s take a look at what they are.