Tips for Running Effective Meetings: InfoGraphic

A recent Infographic caught my eye from visual.ly, a marketing website that caters to producing creative visual content. The Infographic, “The Ugly Truth About Meetings,” creates a nice visual display combining data from several sources about what makes a meeting ineffective and ways to run an effective meeting. The number one killer of meetings is multitasking. Checking email and doing things completely unrelated to work during a meeting was admitted by 92% of survey respondents. Other key killers of meeting effectiveness were remote participants not being engaged and lack of planning and structure for the meeting. Tips for keeping meetings relevant and effective are to schedule shorter meetings, set clear expectations, send materials in advance, avoid monologues, and other points (see the infographic for full listing). When it came to remote participants, the sources found that 57% of people participating via a phone call were not engaged and were multitasking during the meeting as compared to only 4% of people participating via video calls. Video calls are more beneficial because they improve engagement, enhance the decision making process, and increase team productivity.