Most people have a love-hate relationship with meetings. It’s understood that they’re necessary to move an organization forward, but

It’s easy to get stuck in small details or have the meeting turn into something that feels like a waste of time. That’s because meetings aren’t fun and they aren’t productive. More than $37 billion a year is wasted on unproductive meetings.

Your job is to make meetings fun and productive and get people engaged. How can you do that? Read n to learn a few fun meeting topics that you can incorporate into your next meeting.

1. Start at a Time that Corresponds with the Agenda

You can be playful about the meeting time you set by setting an unusual meeting time. Most meetings start on the hour or half-hour.

You can add meaning to your meeting by starting at a number that is tied to your project. A project goal may be to get 12% increase in sales. You can start your meeting at 10:12 to get the point across.

2. Have a Five-Minute Contest

If you need your team to be creative during the meeting, start with a creative activity. Give everyone crayons or Play-Doh and give them 5 minutes to make a creation.

Take another 2 minutes to admire each other’s creation and jump right into the meeting. If there’s time at the end, ask everyone to share their inspiration for the piece.

3. Take the Meeting Outside

Your team wants to be outside getting fresh air. On nice days, have the meeting outside and enjoy a new perspective while getting the hard work done.

Other Useful Meeting Tips

One of the reasons why meetings aren’t productive is because everyone in the room except the speaker is checking email or doing something else. One way around this is to get people engaged. Ask a lot of questions and pick on people individually.

The worst thing about meetings is that they take up time. Everyone in the room has something better to do than sit in a room for an hour. On top of that, someone can hijack the meeting and drag it out even longer.

You have to combat this is to have an agenda. You’ll want to use meeting agenda templates to create your agenda and sent it out to the attendees beforehand. That will let people know you mean business.

Scheduling 30 minutes as opposed to 60 minutes will also keep everyone in the room on task. It’s up to you as the meeting organizer to be the Sergeant-at-Arms, where you decide what to discuss and when. You have to be strong and be able to tell people no on occasion.

That prevents people from going off-topic and making the meeting longer than it needs to be.

Fun Meeting Topics to Keep Everyone Engaged

One of the challenges of running a meeting is keeping people mentally in the room. It’s all too easy for people to be working on other things while they’re in a meeting. That’s a huge reason why meetings are unproductive.

Using some of these fun meeting topics and meeting tips will keep your meetings short and productive. They’ll also make sure that everyone is focused and engaged.

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