Essential Meeting Blueprints for Managers: Wasted meetings mean wasted time and potential. Ensure your meetings are as productive as possible with strategic planning best practices and more.

The goal of the status meeting is based upon two factors:

Meeting frequency refers to how often the meeting is conducted. A daily meeting will have a different goal than a weekly meeting. Weekly meetings should be different from monthly meetings, and so on.

The frequency of a meeting is usually driven by the organizational culture. Alexa Von Tobel is the founder and CEO of LearnVest.com, a financial-management and lifestyle website. In an article, she wrote for Inc.com, Von Tobel shares how often LearnVest.com conducts status meetings. "We hold an all-hands meeting every two weeks and I do a 'State of the Union' address to everyone, every three months. That may not work for your start-up, but it's certainly worked for us." In the same article, she points out that it's okay to change how often meetings are held. "Over the years, I found that having meetings once a week was too much—we didn't have enough updates worth stopping the whole team for...

Dustin Moskovitz and Jason Womack, writing for TheBuildNetwork, cited a Psychology Today study that said 70 percent of employees say status update meetings don't help them get any work done. They suggest that the way to cure ineffective meetings is to manage meeting time rigorously, including setting days of the week when meetings are not allowed. One company calls it "No Meeting Wednesday."

I agree that status meetings often get a bad reputation for being time wasters. It's a common challenge. The meeting becomes a time waster in two ways:

However, declaring a day of the week when meetings cannot be held seems like you're trading off one problem for another. For example, what if the company has a huge presentation to a client on Thursday and needs a last minute meeting on Wednesday to review details? Does the company risk losing a piece of business because of "No Meeting Wednesday...

Meetings that are held on a regular basis need agendas. They don't have to be printed agendas; they can be e-mailed, although printed agendas can be helpful. In my experience, participants can forget to bring agendas, even when you tell them to print and bring the agenda to the meeting. This causes a delay at the beginning of the meeting, because someone will have to go print a handful of agendas.

For some meetings, a printed agenda isn't practical. The stand-up meeting I mentioned earlier didn't have a printed agenda, but the format was exactly the same every day:

The meeting was simple and straightforward. If the Sales Director wasn't present, he sent the assistant director to report in his place. Everyone knew the agenda and it...

A regularly scheduled status meeting should have four parts:

During the welcome, the meeting chair should convey any meeting logistics, introduce new participants, and provide some introductory points. If the group meets in the same place, then everyone probably knows the logistics, for example where the bathrooms are located. But for groups that rotate their location, this is important. In addition, for groups that meet infrequently, including a planned activity during the introduction to connect the participants is important.

Because status meetings can be easily held over the phone, technology is an important consideration. Employees who work virtually have the benefit of using computers, laptops, tablets, and even their smartphones to participate in meetings. The challenge becomes making sure that when the meeting is being held using technology that participants are paying attention.

Program Manager Nicole Steinbok presented a concept at the event Seattle Ignite 9 called the 22 Minute Meeting. She explains that 30 and 60 minutes don't leave any time to get things done between meetings, so 22 minutes allows us to hold a meeting and still sort things out in between. Since the meeting is short, Steinbok recommends banning the use of technology. For 22 minutes you ought to be able to completely focus.

Theoretically, this is totally true. For a short meeting, like a stand-up meeting, people should be able to focus on the content and not check their devices. The longer the meeting, the more...

I mentioned earlier that taking meeting minutes is a tough job. It's also a very essential role. Minutes are the record of the meeting. They are necessary for so many reasons:

I've discovered some of the best advice, tips, and resources for meetings by watching and listening to others. Here are some pointers you can incorporate into your next meeting:

Kristofer Cooper, Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Morse Life, a recognized provider of health care, housing, and support services for seniors and their families, says preparation is key:

A status meeting is exactly that—a meeting to share the status of something. They're important for keeping the business running. If the meeting stays focused on that goal of keeping the operation informed, then the meeting stays valuable and productive. Groups can also use tools, such as meeting agendas and the parking lot, to keep the conversation on track.

How often you conduct a status meeting is based on the status you're sharing. It can range from daily to annually. The goal is to create a balance between holding them enough to get good information but not so much that participants get bored.

In the next chapter, we're going to talk about another kind of sharing meeting—brainstorming.