By Bizna Brand Analyst

Today’s leaders often recognize the power of smaller and briefer meetings. Shorter meetings are often easier to schedule and fit in to everyone’s calendars. When meetings are disciplined and streamlined, they may also seem less intimidating. People may be less likely to duck them. Shorter meetings often tend not to get bogged down in too much detail or sidetracked by unnecessary issues. More gets done.

For those reasons, you should always come up with a clear plan for managing your business meetings to stay on-task and productive. Once you have a plan, you can communicate it to your team.

here are the most important things to keep in mind.

1. Communicate a clear objective in advance.

When you are the boss, make sure every meeting to have a clearly stated objective.  While the reason may be clear in the mind of the person organizing the meeting, to others it may not be nearly as clear. Instead of a cryptic description, meeting invitations might state the objective in terms of the result expected, such as, “The objective of this meeting is to disuss about company transport.”

2. Add an agenda to the calendar invitation.

Outline a brief agenda and include it in an emailed meeting invitation.  Train your team to review agendas in advance and show up prepared. They can think about the agenda topics, look up facts and figures in advance, and come in with suggestions. To access the agenda, people just pull up the meeting invitation—no hunting around for a separate document.

3. Cut the participant list to just a few people.

While it might seem efficient to include everyone in one giant meeting, the opposite is often true. Inviting people who aren’t essential may waste their time, and may make it harder on others who are essential. The more people, the longer a meeting tends to take.

People who are bored and sending texts in the background of a meeting may be a distraction to everyone else.

4. Stick to start and end times.

Meetings should have both start and end times. Start on time. End on time. To do that, the organizer must often manage the discussion and put limits on each agenda item. For example, if it’s an hour long meeting with six agenda items, the organizer may need to bring discussion to a close on each agenda item after 10 minutes. If you haven’t finished everything for that agenda item in the time allotted, consider scheduling follow-up actions. One technique that some companies use to keep meetings timely is to hold them standing up. This way,people wont feel to comfortable to keep extending.

5. Have a clear leader.

One of the quickest ways for meetings to get sidetracked is when too many people try to take control, or go off on tangents. Even if more than one person is sharing information, it typically helps to have one leader—or facilitator—who’s in charge.

Being in charge doesn’t mean monopolizing the conversation. On the contrary, it means making sure everyone who has something to contribute has a say. Team members in your company should be made aware that the leader’s role is to keep the meeting moving. If communicated that way upfront, long-winded participants hopefully won’t take umbrage at being cut short. It’s nothing personal—just process

6. Take notes.

Have you ever been in a strategic planning meeting, and the moment everyone left, they promptly forgot about what was discussed? Ideally, key decisions, brainstorming “aha moments,” and to-do’s should be captured. Consider leveraging technology for taking notes. Or always handle out notepads and pens.

7. Follow up.

After your meeting, participants will hopefully feel confident about what’s expected of them. To be sure you’re on the same page, a simple follow-up email may be effective. Or simply list to-do items and assign responsibilities in a shared cloud document, if that’s what you used to take notes. If a follow-up meeting is required, consider setting it before ending the first meeting, so it doesn’t fall through the cracks.

These seven meeting processes can become part of your company’s strategic meeting management plan. Get your team to understand them and buy in, and hopefully your meetings can become more productive.