Business meetings can be an incredibly useful way to communicate with your colleagues or clients, but they can also be a colossal waste of time. It all depends on how you organise them.

Meetings can sway so severely from ultra-productive mastermind sessions to discussions that only generate hot air because human communication is difficult to control.

You cannot force anyone to discuss certain topics at a particular speed, and countless different factors can delay meaningful conversation. Some people excel in the meeting environment, whereas others use it as a chance to skive off work for twenty minutes and have an idle chat with their colleagues.

However, while you can never one hundred percent control the outcome of a particular meeting, there are steps you can take to increase the chances of your discussion being productive.

This is how to ensure every business meeting is productive:

Make sure you have help organising the logistics

If you or your team need to travel to attend a meeting, then a whole host of issues can prevent it from being productive.

Travelling across the country (or visiting another one) can be complicated to organise, requiring you to find travel connections on time and on budget, put your team up in suitable accommodation, and do your best to prevent any travel-related delays which might put the meeting in jeopardy.

For this reason, outsourcing your meeting organisation to a firm like Amex Global Business Travel is a great way to ensure that logistical gremlins stand little chance of infiltrating themselves.

Instead, you can focus on preparing yourself for your meeting and ensuring it goes ahead successfully.

Get lots of rest before overseas meetings

Of course, if you have to attend an overseas meeting, your approach will differ considerably compared with a meeting taking place down the road.

This does not just concern the travel itself, but the impact it will have on your body.

Anyone who has experienced severe jet lag will know that trying to work through it is borderline impossible.

Unfortunately, many businesses force their employees to attend meetings as soon as they have stepped off the plane in a far-off country. This demonstrates a severe lack of respect for their own employees, but it dooms the meeting to be ineffectual.

At the end of the day, you can’t expect to perform at your best if you are operating on no sleep, in a different time zone, with no time to adjust to a very different environment.

Therefore, always book meetings at least a day after you land. This will give you time to recover and perform at your best.

Create a list of items to discuss

A meeting will not be productive if it has no structure. Therefore, you should write up a list of topics to discuss in the order of their importance.

This will help ensure that the meeting stays on track and that everyone knows what they need to prioritise.

Set a strict time limit

A lot of issues within meetings stem from a lack of urgency. People tend to panic when they feel that they need to perform under the spotlight and start waffling.

This makes them sound like they know what they are talking about, but it only acts as a smokescreen that clouds the meeting, making it difficult to push a coherent agenda.

To combat this, consider enforcing a strict time limit, which will help condense the conversation.