If your calendar is packed but outcomes feel lacking, you’re not alone. At Apolitical’s recent event, How to Make Meetings More Productive, public servants from around the world came together to tackle a universal frustration: the meeting that could have been an email.

We learned from a line-up of expert speakers on how to prep, lead and follow-through on meetings in the public service. The big theme was that productive meetings are the result of purposeful design and effective facilitation.

Here are the standout themes to make your next meeting more productive.

1. Start by defining the purpose

The most effective meeting organisers begin by asking a deceptively simple question: why are we meeting at all?

Meetings should be reserved for moments that genuinely require people to come together, to discuss, debate or decide.

As one speaker put it, if it’s not complex or urgent, it’s worth reconsidering whether another form of collaboration would be more effective. If the goal is simply to share information, a meeting may not be the right tool. Emails, dashboards or shared documents can often do the job better and faster.

2. Design for outcomes

Our speakers spoke about how to build a meeting around outcomes. They recommended:

  • A clear agenda shared in advance
  • Time allocations and owners for each item on the agenda
  • A plan for how each section will run

The most effective meetings guide people through a simple journey: awareness → ownership → commitment.

If your meeting doesn’t end with clear commitments, it hasn’t done its job.

3. Inclusion is essential

Not everyone thrives in the same meeting format. From neurodiversity to cultural differences, the panel highlighted the importance of designing meetings that work for everyone. Practical ways to do this:

  • Share materials in advance so people can prepare
  • Offer different ways to contribute
  • Keep meetings short, with the knowledge that attention spans drop after around 13 minutes
  • Build in breaks and flexibility

When people can participate in ways that suit them, you get better thinking and better decisions.

4. Fight groupthink (politely)

Many of us have been in a meeting where the first opinion becomes the opinion. That’s groupthink, and it has the potential to impede good decision-making by preventing alternative points of view from being shared.

Here are some ways to challenge groupthink:

  • Encourage healthy debate before alignment
  • Assign a rotating “devil’s advocate”
  • Actively invite quieter voices to share

5. Boost participation early

When facilitating a meeting, it can be challenging to get everyone to contribute. One of our experts declared that if people speak once, they’re more likely to speak again, so bringing in little bits of participation at the start of a meeting can really boost participation.

For online meetings, some recommendations were asking participants to check if their mics are working, how to pronounce their names or where they’re joining your call from.

Though small, these questions and prompts can pull people in and encourage them to get involved later on.

6. End with a clear action plan

Before you end your meeting, make sure everyone is clear on the next steps. Our panellists shared some tips, such as:

  • Assigning a named owner to every action
  • Setting a specific deadline (not “soon”)
  • Phrasing actions with a verb, e.g. “Draft proposal” not “Proposal”
  • Agreeing on the first step before leaving the room

7. Respect attendees’ time

All our panellists agreed that keeping a meeting to schedule was a must-have. That means starting and ending on time, or even early.

If you’ve achieved the goal, you can end the meeting. No one needs to sit there just because the calendar says so.

Ready to rethink your meetings?

If you want to go deeper, you can watch the highlights video from the session below.

For the full recording, practical resources, and speaker insights, visit the event page. You’ll also find full speaker bios there.

This article was written with the help of AI using an anonymised transcript and edited by a human before publishing.