It’s be well documented that too many meetings can be a waste of an employee’s time, with Atlassian recording most employees attend 62 meetings a month. However, half of these meeting are considered a waste of time, which means 31 hours a month are spent being unproductive.

Coupled with technology that might be slow and let you down, that’s a lot of time that could have been spent completing other tasks.

There are several traditional ways that the productivity of meetings can be improved. Many of which can easily be adopted, for example has your meeting got a set agenda?

If not make sure you set one as this will not only help your attendees prepare for the meeting, it will also make sure you stay on topic. You could also try different ways of conducting meetings, according to an article in Forbes standing up during meetings cut time for one company by 25%.

>See also: How to make BYOD for collaboration work in the meeting room

While there are a variety of ways to cut meetings in a traditional setting, utilising technology can also help to improve both meeting and general office efficiency. One of the first steps you should take in making your office and meetings more efficient is to identify the problems that you want to solve. Start by conducting a quick survey with staff and collate feedback on what they feel could be improved.

One element that might be an issue is not having up to date technology. Research has uncovered that UK office workers waste at least 21 days each year due to slow technology.

This doesn’t just include computers/laptops, it will include day to day meeting appliances such as printers and projectors. For example, switching to an advanced projector will not only help with speeding up meeting room productivity, a model such as an interactive projector can become a boardroom essential allowing for easy group collaboration.

Another way to improve efficiency would be to improve communication whilst not in meetings. There are many platforms that can help you do this, some of the most popular are Slack, Facebook at Work and Basecamp.

Nevertheless, these platforms can’t replace meetings, you will still need to have them. It will however, help improve communication before the meeting starts, helping to facilitate shorter meeting as there will be less areas to cover.

>See also: Utilising Skype for Business

You should also look to utilise tracking software such as LessMeeting so you can closely monitor how much time is being spent in meetings. There’s also advanced note taking capabilities which will allow you to assign an action to a team member right there, making the follow up meeting email a thing of the past.

Try upgrading your conference call software to services such as UberConference which allows you to share your screen, easily drop clients/team members in and out of calls and easily record calls.

With technology comes new ways to streamline not only meetings but the office as a whole, improving employee satisfaction along with increasing their productivity. By making room for more advanced technologies such as interactive projectors and embracing new systems such as UberConference, you will allow for increased collaboration for employees and clients inside or outside the physical location of the office.