Five Meeting Taboos to Avoid

Meetings are an essential part of business culture. However, when meetings are run incorrectly, they lower morale, inhibit decision-making and prevent employees from getting essential work done. Every business professional needs to learn about the five most common meeting taboos and how to avoid them. By avoiding meeting taboos, business professionals are able to run effective and efficient meetings that help all involved achieve their goals.

The first meeting taboo involves creating a culture of lateness. If a business professional gets in the habit of starting meetings late, meeting attendees quickly learn that it is not important to arrive on time. Starting meetings late wastes everyone's time, so managers need to make sure to start every meeting on schedule. If attendees are tardy, it is their responsibility to catch up on what they missed.

Another time-wasting meeting taboo occurs when business professionals invite people to meetings who do not actually need to attend. The only people who belong in meetings are people who are directly involved in the meeting agenda and decision-making process. Inviting non-essential staff to meetings simply to keep them in the loop wastes their time and prevents them from getting their own work done. Instead, a good manager only invites the people essential to the agenda and sends out a status update to all team members afterwards.

Every meeting needs a clearly defined agenda. A good agenda lists the purpose of the meeting, the topics to be discussed and the decisions to be made during the meeting. The person running the meeting is also responsible for sticking to the agenda and making sure the discussion does not run off course.

The fourth meeting taboo involves wasting time during the meeting by reading PowerPoint slides, memos or similar material aloud to meeting participants. As Forbes notes, any PowerPoint slides or other material relevant to the meeting should be distributed to participants in advance of the meeting. The participants are then responsible for reading and understanding the material prior to the meeting, and they enter the meeting ready to discuss the material in accordance with the meeting agenda.

The final and most important meeting taboo is when a meeting ends without discussing action items or next steps. At the end of a successful meeting, everyone who attended should have a new task to complete, such as researching an item discussed during the meeting or preparing a report to the specifications agreed upon during the meeting. If the meeting ends without a discussion of next steps and a distribution of tasks, the meeting has failed.

Every manager and business professional should learn these five meeting taboos and work to avoid them. If one of these taboos occurs during a meeting, it is still possible to have a successful meeting; however, repeated taboos need to be avoided. The more meeting taboos a company avoids, the more work the company is able to accomplish during its meetings and the more productive its meetings become.

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