Meetings are a major part of people’s working lives, yet they rarely engage with those present. Not only is time spent in meetings, time that you could be spending working on something more productive, but research suggests that billions are lost every year on the same mistakes. Here’s how to make sure your company meetings are worth your time.

Focus on quality over quantity

That’s right. Perhaps the simplest criticism of the current state of meetings is that we have way too many of them. In fact, new research suggests that, over the course of the average worker’s life, you’ll waste an entire year in useless meetings. This means that the average office worker in the UK is spending around 16 hours in meetings each week, a quarter of which is deemed pointless. Over the course of a year, this works out to more than 200 hours.

Over the entire length of a typical career, this number approaches an incredible 9,000 hours. Most of this wasted time is attributed to poorly planned events. It’s not uncommon for a meeting to begin with an attempt to try and bring everyone up to speed on a subject, only for this to end up taking up the bulk of the allotted time. The remainder of the session then ends up being spent planning the next event.

Try a change of scenery

A recent study found that almost two-thirds of planners agreed that meetings held in off-site locations were more productive than those spent in-house. It’s not hard to see why. Rather than squeezing everybody into the spare room at your office, booking a room at a professional-grade facility will ensure that all of your employees feel comfortable throughout the day and can better focus on the intended discussion.

With more and more employees working remotely from home or even in other parts of the world, it’s critical that you’re chosen facility come equipped with the latest technological features, such as high-speed Wi-Fi, video conferencing software, and projector equipment to get you started. This will make it easier to connect with any employees working out of area

Just because there’s problems with the way we currently arrange meetings doesn’t mean we have to abandon the idea altogether. When done right, they still offer the opportunity for different members of the team to voice their opinions on the current state of affairs.