If you want to find out whether you are conducting meetings in the organization properly, just pause in the middle of the meeting and request all the persons attending the meeting to clarify why they are here.
If they have a clear idea of their purpose and objective of the meeting, you are doing a good job. However, if the participants have absolutely had no idea why they are in the meeting, it obviously speaks very bad view of your organization skills.
Each and every meeting must have a formal proprietary process. Just because it is formal does not mean it should take a long time. However, there should be certain efforts attached to the initial preparatory process related to business meetings. For starters, each and every person must be informed of the meeting in advance.
The idea is to provide maximum notice to the parties to help them prepare for the meeting. If just one person is going to be prepared on the agenda and if all others are simply going to listen, it is going to be a speech and not a meeting. If you are keen on brainstorming ideas, there is no point in catching your employees off guard.
Try to fix a time which is going to facilitate maximum exchange of ideas. Otherwise, you will simply be wasting your time and time of your employees.
Secondly, you should convey the objective of the meeting in very clear terms. Some managers like to hide this point so that they can control the way the meeting proceeds. Well, that may help you feel satisfied but that is not going to help your organization. Unless you treat your employees like a waste of space, you cannot afford to ignore their views and opinions.
This is particularly important where the employees are the ones who interact with customers and bring ground reality feedback. If used properly, such meetings can become a valuable area for exchange of ideas and information up the chain of command.
