17 Easy Ways to Make Your Meetings Better

Discover 17 science-backed ways to make meetings better. Research-proven tips for before, during, and after every meeting.

Do you dread meetings? You might be making one of the top 7 meeting mistakes. Don’t worry! In our video below, I am going to go through each of the 7 meeting mistakes and give you 7 easy meeting solutions:

Business people have a lot of meetings. So many, in fact, that by the time you finish reading this sentence 8,000 meetings will have started in the US. For many of us, the idea of attending (or worse, hosting) a meeting is enough to strike fear into our hearts. For others, they are just a time-sucking bore. In fact, a survey of US workers cited ”too many meetings’ as the biggest waste of their time.

Meetings done badly can be boring, time consuming, and incredibly unproductive, which isn’t just frustrating for everyone involved, but is extremely costly for a business.

Unproductive meetings waste more than $37 billion per year in the US alone.

And there are so many different kinds of meetings! From staff meetings to task forces to brainstorming to ceremonial meetings — you need to know how to have a better meeting.

We have to improve the way we do meetings. This means creating a meeting plan of action.

It’s finally time to say goodbye to terrible meetings and usher in a new way of doing things!

This is why I’ve put together Meetings 101.

Before the Meeting

Assess the reason for the meeting.

Meetings should be focused around making important decisions and involve problem solving or deep discussions. Too often, meetings are used for sharing routine information with a team. Think to yourself, can you effectively communicate this information in an email? If yes, do that. It will save time, and your team will thank you for it.

Consider everything you need to bring with you.

Don’t turn up to a meeting empty-handed, particularly if you are hosting the meeting. At the very least, you will need your notes on what you want to discuss and achieve. But also you need a pen and paper so you can jot down anything important.

It’s also worth considering if you need any documentation with you to share with attendees, such as:

• Data and statistics
• Charts and reports
• Sales plans
• Production plans
• Minutes from previous meetings

This all will vary from industry to industry, and even business to business, or team to team, but you get the general gist of it.

Let everyone know the agenda.

If you decide you do need to hold the meeting, you will still need to send an email with the goals you have set. Letting all of the attendees know exactly what you want to achieve and talk about will help everyone stay focused on the matters at hand.

Only around 37 percent of meetings in the US use agendas, despite the fact they greatly improve productivity.

Additionally, a pioneering study in the field of psychology suggests that agendas should be discussed at the beginning, and areas of importance dealt with first to keep everything super focused.

Invite the people who need to be there.

It is a waste of time and people-power to be bringing people into the meeting who do not need to be there. Consider who will benefit from the meeting, and who the experts are that need to be there, and invite attendees based on this.

Some studies suggest that up to 71 percent of senior managers consider meetings unproductive and inefficient, and inviting the wrong people can be one of the biggest reasons for this.

Stick to the “two pizza rule.”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos started this as an idea. He applied it to teams generally, though it also can work for meetings.

If you need more than two pizzas to feed everybody, there are too many people.

You’ve heard the phrase too many chefs spoil the broth? It’s true. Studies have shown that for each person over seven members in a group, decision-making effectiveness is reduced by about 10 percent. Eek! Also, the larger the group, the more counterproductive behavior and interpersonal aggression occurs.

The reasons for this are pretty clear — the more people, the more discussion is needed, the more disagreements occur, and the more tensions rise.

If it’s a good enough rule for Jeff Bezos, it’s a good enough rule for us.

Pro Tip: Use a RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) before sending your meeting invite. Anyone who falls into the “Informed” category probably does not need to attend — just send them the minutes afterward. This simple filter can cut your attendee list by 20 to 30 percent and keep the room focused on decision-makers.

Set your default meeting length to 25 minutes.

Here is a deceptively powerful change: shorten your default meeting from 30 minutes to 25, and your hour-long meetings to 50 minutes. Those five or ten minutes of buffer give everyone time to take notes, grab water, or mentally reset before the next commitment on their calendar.

This is not just a quirky hack. Google adopted the 25-minute default across its calendar system, and Shopify made a similar company-wide policy change, removing meetings from calendars altogether during certain periods and shortening default durations.¹ Parkinson’s Law tells us that work expands to fill the time allotted — so if you give a discussion 30 minutes, it will take 30 minutes. Trim that window and watch people get to the point faster.

Action Step: Go into your calendar settings right now and change your default event duration to 25 minutes. Most calendar apps (Google Calendar, Outlook) let you do this in two clicks. You will be surprised how rarely you actually need that extra five minutes.

Design the physical (or virtual) environment.

Research has shown that designing your meeting to consider noise level, lighting, and refreshments all can improve perceptions of meeting quality. Who wants a meeting over lunch with no food? Or a meeting first thing in the morning without coffee on tap?

Making your attendees comfortable will mean they are more likely to pay attention and to participate, and it will be a more comfortable experience for all.

The addition of refreshments particularly can help make your meeting an enjoyable social occasion, rather than an activity that everyone has to force themselves to attend. That can make it a great opportunity for team building and networking instead.

But comfort goes deeper than snacks. Room temperature has a measurable impact on cognitive performance. Research from Cornell University found that workers in offices at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit made 44 percent more errors than those in rooms kept near 72 degrees Fahrenheit.² If your conference room feels like a sauna or an icebox, people are not thinking at their best. Keep the thermostat in the 68 to 72 degree range for optimal brainpower.

For short check-ins and standup-style meetings, consider standing meeting tables. A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that standing meetings were approximately 34 percent shorter than seated ones — with no loss in decision quality.³ If your team runs daily 15-minute syncs, standing up can shave five minutes off each one, adding up to over 20 hours saved per year across a team.

For virtual meetings, environment design matters just as much:

• Use gallery view for collaborative discussions so everyone can see each other’s faces, and speaker view for presentations where focus needs to be on one person.
• Keep your background clean and professional — a cluttered background is a real-world distraction. Virtual backgrounds are fine, but choose something simple and non-distracting.
• Make sure your lighting comes from in front of you, not behind. A window behind your head turns you into a silhouette.

Action Step: Before your next meeting, do a five-minute “environment audit.” Check the temperature, ensure adequate lighting, set out water or coffee, and test any A/V equipment. For virtual meetings, check your camera angle and background before you click “join.”

Consider your presentation.

Are you going to be using a computer presentation during your meeting? Or perhaps you just will use a flipchart or whiteboard?

We’ve already covered some great ideas that will radically improve your presentation. But the bullet point version is make sure it’s kept concise, it’s designed simply, it’s not overly verbose, and it’s delivered with confidence.

Also, people absorb information much easier if it is presented visually. This means that using images, diagrams, graphs, etc, all help convey your point. Don’t go overboard, though, just enough that each image clearly presents your point.

Bonus: Pick the right online meeting tools.

It can be hard getting your message across if you’re going online. If you’re struggling to get the same to your audience from physical meetings, you might need to consider meeting tools to add that extra oomph.

Here’s a list of tools you can consider, courtesy of Product Hunt:

• Rate the meeting helps with scheduling and gathering feedback after each meeting
• Hugo turns your calendar into a collaborative note-taking tool
• Navigator creates a collaborative workspace for each meeting
• Jottie brings note-taking, to-do lists and decisions making to meetings
• Tooqan collects honest feedback post-meeting from attendees
• Loom kills the meeting
• Veed is an alternative to Loom that records your screen and webcam side by side
• Range visualizes your team’s daily standup asynchronously in Slack
• Meetingbird means you can avoid the back-and-forth when scheduling a meeting
• And when you’re stuck in a painful meeting, use Callback to fake an “emergency call”.

Think of tools as helpers— make sure your meeting is solid and not just fluff before adding in tools. Remember: a good tool can’t save a bad meeting.

During the Meeting

Create psychological safety first.

Before you can get the best ideas out of your team, you need to make people feel safe enough to share them. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety to describe a team climate where people feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks — speaking up, admitting mistakes, or pitching unconventional ideas without fear of punishment or humiliation.⁴

This is not just a nice-to-have. Google’s famous Project Aristotle — a multi-year study of 180 teams — found that psychological safety was the single most important factor distinguishing high-performing teams from average ones.⁵ It mattered more than individual talent, team structure, or workload.

So what does this look like in practice? In a psychologically unsafe meeting, you will notice people staying silent when they disagree, deferring to the highest-paid person’s opinion, or only sharing ideas after testing them privately with allies. In a psychologically safe meeting, junior team members challenge assumptions openly, people say things like “I might be wrong, but…” without fear, and bad news surfaces early rather than being hidden.

Edmondson’s research points to three things leaders can say to build this climate:⁶

1. “I may miss something — I need to hear from you.” This signals that your perspective is not the only one that matters.
2. Frame work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Instead of “Why did this fail?” try “What can we learn from this?”
3. Model curiosity by asking genuine questions. Leaders who ask more questions than they give answers create space for others to contribute.

The single most important factor in high-performing teams is not talent or resources — it is psychological safety.

Action Step: Open your next team meeting with an explicit invitation: “I want to hear what is not working, and I promise there will be no negative consequences for honesty.” Then follow through — the first time someone shares critical feedback, thank them publicly. That one moment does more for psychological safety than any policy memo.

Encourage everyone to contribute.

A meta-analysis of 200 studies on the psychology of meetings suggests that high-level performers use meetings as a way to set goals, gain feedback from the team, and help individuals understand problems at work.

It’s vital for all of your team to be contributing to the discussion and planning.

You might be missing crucial information about a developing situation, or lose out on some valuable insight, if half of your team is sitting quietly behind the desk rather than voicing their opinions.

Crack a joke or two.

Just like every other area of life, laughter can make experiences more positive. Using humor in meetings can encourage more participation from the team, and improve creative problem solving skills.

Unsurprisingly, if people are enjoying the meeting, then it is more likely to have a positive effect on the team generally.

A fascinating study by researcher Leigh Thompson at Northwestern University demonstrated just how powerful this can be. In the experiment, participants were asked to share an embarrassing story with their group before a brainstorming session. The result? The groups primed with embarrassment-induced laughter generated 26 percent more ideas across 15 percent more categories compared to control groups.⁷ The vulnerability of laughing together lowered people’s internal censors and made them more willing to throw out unconventional ideas.

There is an important caveat here, though. Humor should always punch up, not down. Sarcasm, inside jokes that exclude people, or humor directed at specific individuals can backfire badly, especially in diverse teams where cultural norms around humor vary widely. The safest and most effective meeting humor is self-deprecating — poking fun at yourself, at the meeting itself (“Okay, I promise this is the last spreadsheet”), or at shared frustrations that everyone can relate to.

Pro Tip: If you want a low-risk way to add laughter, start with an ice-breaker question like “What is the worst meeting you have ever attended, and why?” or “If this meeting were a movie genre, what would it be?” These get people laughing without anyone feeling targeted. If you’re worried about not being funny enough, check out our article on how to be funny for some tips and tricks.

Read the room with body language.

This is particularly important if you are presenting the meeting, but also if you are an attendee. Open, engaged body language will help you to appear (and feel!) more engaged, and will facilitate others reacting to your words positively.

Some things to consider include:

• The position of your arms — at your side is least threatening, while crossing your arms can give a sense of distance/closed-offness.
• Eye contact — take the time to make sure you have made eye contact with each member of the group, so everyone feels more engaged with what you are saying.
• Your voice — not too loud that you sound overbearing, and not too quiet that you sound like you are lacking confidence. It’s a careful balance, but you will see an improvement in your meetings if you can come across as both confident and approachable.

But body language in meetings goes far beyond the basics. Here are some specific techniques that can change the dynamic of your next meeting:

To project authority and engagement:

• Use the triangle gaze — look between the other person’s eyes and forehead when making a serious point. This subtle shift from social gazing (eyes to mouth) to authority gazing signals confidence and gravitas.
• Lean in slightly when someone else is speaking. This is one of the simplest and most powerful engagement signals in human communication. It tells the speaker, “I am interested in what you are saying.”
• Practice mirroring — subtly matching the posture and gestures of the person you are speaking with. Research shows mirroring builds rapport and trust without the other person consciously noticing it.⁸

Watch for these signals in others:

• Sudden posture shifts often signal disagreement or discomfort, even when someone’s words say otherwise. If a team member abruptly leans back or crosses their arms during a discussion, there may be an unspoken objection worth surfacing.
• Self-soothing gestures — touching the neck, rubbing hands together, or fidgeting with jewelry — are reliable indicators of anxiety or stress. If you notice these during a high-stakes discussion, it may be time to pause and check in.
• The “lean back” disconnect: when someone slowly reclines in their chair and angles their body away from the table, they have mentally checked out. This is your cue to re-engage them directly, perhaps by asking for their input.

Your body is always communicating in meetings — the only question is whether you are doing it intentionally.

For virtual meetings, body language takes on a different dimension:

• Position your camera at eye level. Looking down at a laptop camera makes you appear disengaged or even condescending. Stack some books under your laptop, or invest in a simple stand.
• Look at the camera lens, not the screen, when you are speaking. This creates the illusion of direct eye contact for everyone watching. It feels unnatural at first, but the impact is significant.
• Keep your hands visible in the frame. Research on body language shows that visible hands increase trust. Use open palm gestures when explaining ideas — it signals honesty and openness even through a screen.

Action Step: In your next meeting, pick one body language cue to focus on — either in yourself (try the triangle gaze) or in others (watch for the lean-back disconnect). Mastering one cue at a time is more effective than trying to track everything at once.

Keep it short.

The average meeting lasts from 30 minutes to an hour, but our attention span is closer to ten to fifteen minutes. Not only is it more pleasant for everyone if meetings are kept shorter, but we find it harder to absorb information if we are overwhelmed.

Nine out of 10 people daydream during meetings.

And, even worse, 73 percent of people in a meeting are working on other things!

The entire purpose of a meeting is lost if people are not taking value from it. And you may as well literally be burning money (and time!). Staring out the window and thinking about what items you would need to survive a zombie apocalypse might be fun, but it’s certainly not productive.

This can be avoided, though (daydreaming — not the zombie apocalypse) by keeping everything short, simple, and straight to the point. This means everyone can get back to their desks, and are more likely to have absorbed the meeting’s key points.

Try a walking meeting.

Not every meeting needs a conference room. Walking meetings — where you take the discussion on foot, usually outdoors — can boost creative thinking, improve mood, and reduce the restlessness that comes from sitting in the same chair for hours.

A Stanford study found that walking increased creative output by an average of 60 percent compared to sitting. The effect held whether people walked on a treadmill or outdoors, suggesting that it is the physical movement itself that unlocks divergent thinking.⁹

Walking meetings also have a social leveling effect. When people walk side by side rather than sitting across from each other at a table, hierarchical dynamics soften. There is no “head of the table” on a walking path. This can make junior team members more comfortable sharing ideas and pushback.

Steve Jobs was famously devoted to walking meetings, often conducting his most important conversations on foot around Palo Alto. Mark Zuckerberg adopted the same practice, reportedly holding walking meetings for one-on-ones with colleagues and job candidates alike.

Pro Tip: Walking meetings work best for one-on-ones or groups of three — anything larger and you will end up in a scattered cluster where half the group cannot hear. They are ideal for brainstorming, relationship building, and problem-solving conversations, but not for anything that requires slides, note-taking, or screen-sharing.

A quick caveat: be mindful of weather and accessibility. Not everyone can comfortably walk for 20 to 30 minutes, and a rainy day will undermine even the best intentions. Always offer a seated alternative and let people opt in rather than making it mandatory.

Be tactful.

This is the time to bring out the very best of your people skills. Meetings often are about handling difficult situations: perhaps negotiating a sale with a challenging client, managing conflict between two employees, or even making someone redundant.

You will need to approach these situations with care and tact.

You can do this by bringing out your best people management skills, such as your persuasion techniques and charismatic abilities, and carefully thinking through the situation as you proceed through the meeting.

Avoid complaining.

This doesn’t just mean you shouldn’t complain, but also redirect team members who are complaining. Once you start complaining, you create an atmosphere of hopelessness. So, managers should be quick to move the conversation away from this.

Listening to regular complaining is linked to depression and anxiety, particularly in a workplace where you are expected to hold back emotions and stop yourself from exploding. Instead, encourage employees to voice their concerns in a more productive way, such as an email after the meeting as part of the feedback process.

Keep focused and engaged

Remember that agenda you wrote down before the meeting? Stick to it. You could have a copy of it printed and lying on the desk if you feel it might help you to stay on track. This is the best way to make sure the meeting is effective and keeps to its purpose, and makes sure that you all stay motivated.

Managers should prepare to identify when conversation becomes unfocused, and redirect it when needed (a skill that you might have come across during leadership training).

We know, sometimes this is easier said than done. But attendee involvement has a direct effect on the effectiveness of meetings, according to scientific research in the field. (It also will stop you from becoming one of the 39 percent of people attending who fall asleep during meetings).

As an attendee, you can stay focused by asking questions when you want to understand something further, writing notes, or drawing diagrams. Experiment with different things, and find out what works for you.

As a meeting host, it can be a little harder to keep everyone engaged. But your best chances are if you open the meeting energetically, passionately, and positively. Then, people are more likely to follow suit.

After the Meeting

Share the minutes.

Recording minutes from the meeting, and then sending them to attendees, is a great way to provide a record of what decisions were made, who has been allocated what roles and responsibilities, and the plan of action for the future.

What is the point of a perfectly efficient meeting if nobody actually remembers what was said?

When you’re writing the minutes (or a designated team member, if you’d rather delegate this task) it’s important to include:

• The names of all participants present
• A brief summary of the agenda
• Each action/task
• All deadlines/due dates of the above
• The main points discussed
• Any decisions made
• Documents used, including images, attached files

Not only does reflecting on the minutes help everyone remember the meeting’s important points, but you also can send them to other people who might benefit from the information.

Ask for feedback.

This is an important one. Ask people how they felt about the meeting. And then actually put into action what people have said.

Did people find it engaging? Insightful? Would they have rather it had been shorter?

You also might have to accept that the problem is you (sorry). People aren’t usually very good at identifying their own flaws and weaknesses, and self-critiquing their ability to hold productive meetings isn’t an exception.

In a 1998 Verizon survey, seventy-nine percent of company managers reported that the meetings they hosted were either ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ productive. Although only fifty-six percent of those managers reported saying the same about meetings hosted by others.

Regardless of the feedback — however positive or negative — use the information that the team tells you about the meeting. Also, remember it when you’re planning for future group discussions.

Protect your time with meeting-free days.

One of the most impactful changes an organization can make is not about how you run meetings — it is about when you don’t have them at all.

A landmark study published in MIT Sloan Management Review, analyzing 76 companies that experimented with meeting-free days, found remarkable results. Companies that introduced three meeting-free days per week saw a 73 percent increase in productivity.¹⁰ But the benefits did not stop there: the same study found a 57 percent improvement in cooperation and a 65 percent improvement in communication — outcomes that might seem paradoxical until you realize that fewer meetings forces people to communicate more thoughtfully and asynchronously.

Even a single meeting-free day per week produced meaningful gains in employee satisfaction and autonomy. Microsoft’s own internal research on their workforce found that designating meeting-free Fridays reduced employee stress and helped people complete deep work that had been chronically interrupted by back-to-back scheduling.¹¹

Companies that introduced three meeting-free days per week saw a 73 percent increase in productivity and a 65 percent improvement in communication.

How to implement meeting-free days:

• Start with one day per week. Tuesday or Wednesday tend to work best because they sit in the middle of the week, giving people a block of uninterrupted focus time without disrupting Monday planning or Friday wrap-up rhythms.
• Create a clear exception policy. True emergencies — a production outage, a time-sensitive client issue — can still be handled with a quick sync. The key word is “emergency,” not “convenient.”
• Make it visible. Block the day on shared calendars with a company-wide event. When a meeting-free day is visible to everyone, people feel empowered to decline meeting requests that land on that day.
• Pair it with better async habits. Meeting-free days work best when teams also invest in clear written communication: project updates in shared docs, status updates in Slack or Teams, and decision logs that keep everyone informed without requiring a live conversation.

Action Step: Propose a trial of one meeting-free day per week for your team. Run it for four weeks, then survey the team on productivity and focus. The data will speak for itself.

Plan for the future.

After the meeting is the best time to start thinking about how you are going to follow through with the outcomes from the discussion and build on progress.

You can do this by creating a business meeting follow-up plan following these steps:

• Specify the task.
• Name the person designated to complete the task.
• Determine the deadline for completion.
• Determine what constitutes completion.

After you have decided on this and placed it in a document, it’s important to remember to disseminate this information to everyone involved in that task and those responsible for its execution.

Now that you have learned all of these tips and tricks, it’s time to put them into action. The next time you find yourself in a meeting, take these on board, and see just how quickly you can make these team experiences more positive for you, your team, and the company.

Footnotes (11)

1. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke announced in 2023 that the company had purged over 12,000 recurring meetings from employee calendars and set new defaults for meeting lengths. ↩

2. Hedge, A. (2004). Linking environmental conditions to productivity. Cornell University research, presented at the International Interior Design Association. ↩

3. Bluedorn, A. C., Turban, D. B., & Love, M. S. (1999). The effects of stand-up and sit-down meeting formats on meeting outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(2), 277-285. ↩

4. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. ↩

5. Duhigg, C. (2016). What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. The New York Times Magazine. ↩

6. Edmondson, A. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley. ↩

7. Thompson, L. (2003). Improving the creativity of organizational work groups. Academy of Management Perspectives, 17(1), 96-109. ↩

8. Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(6), 893-910. ↩

9. Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142-1152. ↩

10. Perlow, L. A., Hadley, C. N., & Eun, E. (2017). Stop the meeting madness. Harvard Business Review. Also: Rogelberg, S. G., et al. (2022). Research: Meeting-free days can boost productivity and cooperation. MIT Sloan Management Review. ↩

11. Microsoft WorkLab (2022). Research: Meeting-free Fridays help employees focus and recharge. Internal workforce analytics report. ↩