As I was conducting a leadership retreat last week, one of the participants complained of “meeting madness” and requested that the team adopt a code of conduct for meetings. I think this is a great idea and so I have jotted down some principles that you might adopt for your team or company.

1. Define the ‘type’ of meeting – is it to brainstorm ideas, evaluate options, make a decision or plan execution?
2. Specify a start and end time – meetings do not have to go for an hour, you can start a trend by having 15,20 or 30 minute meetings.
3. Invite only the people who need to be there – nothing is more of a time waster than sitting in a meeting that doesn’t concern you.
4. Send pre-reading by email – make sure people come prepared and on time and that way meetings are more efficient.
5. Start all meeting on time - if you wait, you send the message that it’s not important to be on time.
6. No using phones or laptops – the exception is the laptop for a presentation which should be limited to 10 slides max.
7. Identify a Chairperson – if the team doesn’t play nice or keep to time it is important that one person has the authority to call the meeting to order.
8. Send action points by e-mail after the meeting – to make sure what is agreed to gets done.
9. Avoid Friday – consider making Friday a no meeting day and see if people have time to finish off the weeks work and get some work-life balance.

Do you have any more to add?