5 tips to make meetings more impactful

It is 10 minutes after the meeting is supposed to end, and your boss is still on agenda item number 3, “Sunday attendance report.” You look down the list, and you can’t help but groan a little because there are 4 more items on the agenda. Then you reach for your phone to cancel your next meeting. 

If you feel bored and irrelevant in meetings, know that you are not alone. This is how most people feel about meetings. 

Meetings can drag on, and people share irrelevant information or ask questions too specific to apply to the rest of the group. What’s worse is when you walk away from a meeting, not knowing what you are supposed to do next. You have spent more than an hour on an activity that brings zero impact to your ministry. 

Most meetings do not have a direct impact on your organization. They do not provide clarity on your church’s goal, nor do they help you to grow your ministry in size and in-depth. At best, the boss dumps information and shouts a few commands over the table, so you walk away with a fuzzy idea of what needs to get done next. 

Then you conduct your meetings with your team. You find yourself doing the same thing. Because you weren’t clear on what needs to be accomplished, you drone on and on until the hour is up, 

What if you can turn things around? What if you can have more impactful meetings? What if your meeting makes people feel their time is valued? 

Here are five tips on creating more impactful meetings that can help your team to gain clarity and move your ministry forward: 

Tip #1 Schedule your meetings for 30 minutes. 

Most staff meetings are 1hr long, some are 2 hours long, and they don’t usually start on time. People trickle into hour-long meetings, but I had more success in getting people to show up on time when the meeting is only scheduled to be 30 minutes long. People came in more focused because they knew they only had 30 minutes. 

People have short attention spans. Having shorter meetings can help your team retain more, and it gives your team more time to complete the task. Ministry teams are usually action-oriented, giving them more time to work on the tasks rather than talking about the tasks. 

Having less time creates urgency. Remember your college years; you probably start writing your term paper the night before it is due. You produce faster. You are more focused Giving yourself a shorter amount of time would focused you to be focused and selective. You may produce the same result as a 60 minutes meeting, and maybe more.

Now you might say, “but we have so much to talk about, 30 minutes is just not enough.” 

Think back to your most recent meeting, how much of the meeting time is people sharing irrelevant information? By shortening the meeting time, you can help your team focus on relevant comments, questions, and ideas. 

Tip #2  be selective with your agenda item. 

What do you notice about yourself when you create your agenda item? Perhaps you find yourself begin to fill the agenda with “this can be helpful to the group” or “we need to get on the same page about this.” When you have 60 minutes, your creative juices are flowing, and you come up with all kinds of interesting topic for your agenda. 

Resist the temptation. Now that you have cut your meeting in half, cut your agenda in half. Agenda items are not all created equal. So don’t treat them as equal. Some are more important than others. Very few items will move your ministry forward. Very few items will help you grow your ministry both in size or in depth. Spending valuable meeting time discussing the volunteer rotation schedule will not increase your volunteer engagement. So assign that task to someone and take that off your agenda. 

Ask yourself, if you only have 30 minutes with your team, what is one thing that your team must do to grow your ministry. Over time, your team will become more focused on the project or the task that will move your ministry forward. 

Tip #3 Only invite relevant people.

What happens when you have too many cooks in the kitchen? You will have too many opinions and too many voices around a decision or a discussion that nothing gets done at the end. When you have more people at the table, you will likely to focus on getting a consensus, which will not likely to happen. 

If you only have 30 minutes, and you have already selected the most impactful agenda items, then you probably know who you need to invite to the meeting. One reason that the meetings gets long is because everyone is here you talk about everything. As a result, you talked about nothing. You are meeting to discuss sermon series, then only invite the preaching pastors. If you are meeting to discuss set up for an event, just meet with the person in charge of your facility and your volunteer lead Knowing the purpose of your meeting will help you determine who needs to be a part of the conversation

The less agenda items you have, the more clarity you will have. The more clarity you have, the more selective you will be. Everyone is focused on the agenda’s project or task,. You will get more out of your meeting when you are selective with whom you invite to the table.

Tip #4 Leave announcements out of meetings. 

Announcements are announcements. They are one-way communication from one person to the rest of the group. They have no place in a meeting, because meetings are about collaboration and problem solving. It involves people sharing ideas, offering solutions, and evaluate different options. If you don’t intend to have a discussion around a topic, leave it out of your meetings. 

You may think that announcement is important, everyone needs to be on the same page. Ask someone who just came out of an hour long meeting with lots of announcement, “what did you accomplish in that meeting?” They may say “a lot of things.” This is when you press in and ask, what did you take away from the meeting?” This is when I hear responses such as “nothing important.” Or “it was just a bunch of announcements.” There was nothing substantial or memorable for the people to walk away feeling they had more clarity and purpose. 

It is so interesting that even when people write down the announcement, they still won’t get it 100% Then you have to follow up with an email, and a follow up email to make sure specific individuals do what you have asked them to do. So you are left feeling frustrated and thinking that the meeting is waste of time because you still have to spend your own time to track people down. 

Try this instead: email your announcements. If you do this long enough, people will read your email because it is the only way they will get the information, and you may get more response & action because the announcement is right there. They can act on it when they see it in their inbox. They didn’t have to take notes, go back to their office, and try to figure out what they are supposed to do with the announcement. 

Tip #5 Make sure everyone has at least one action step at the end of the meeting. 

Everyone wants to feel their contribution has a direct impact to your ministry. Take the last few minutes of the meeting asking the question, “what will you do this week to bring a positive impact to our ministry (or our goals).” Allow your team to think and have them come up with their action steps. 

No one likes to be told what to do, but if they can come up with their own action item, they are more likely to take ownership of their action, and see how their action has a direct impact on the organization, which gives them a sense of purpose. 

You might be wondering what to do with the things that has to get done. 

Here is a bonus tip: 

Tip #6: let your team pick the tasks that need to get done: List all the things that needs to get done for your ministry this week, and state how these tasks will positively contribute to your ministry. Then ask for the volunteer. Position these tasks as critical to the survival of the ministry, and you will see your team stepping up to take on these tasks that you thought no one wants. 

Meeting can be impactful, and you can make a positive change to your meeting culture. If you take the time to practice the tips in this blog, consistently and intentionally, you will see your team more focused, more engaged, and more willing to meet with you the next time you say, “let’s set up a meeting.”