4) Practice skills. Create team learning activities that sharpen or teach skills needed in your business. For example, you could role play job skills (especially useful for sales teams), solve puzzles (useful for high tech groups), or take quizzes (useful for everyone). Ask group members to take turns bringing an activity that reviews or teaches a valuable skill. Follow this activity with a brief recap of key ideas. Then ask group members to give a fifteen second report on how these ideas can be applied to improve their work. Plan a time budget: 10 to 20 minutes.

5) Solve problems. Give each group member a minute to describe a challenge that hinders work on a current project and then let everyone propose solutions. Suggestions should be brief and free of self aggrandizing explanations or motivational sermons. This process also requires a positive, supportive environment to succeed. If this is used to ridicule, insult, or criticize individual, then people will be reluctant to reveal issues that need attention. Plan a time budget: 3 to 6 minutes per person.

This step becomes difficult for less tangible results, such as exchanging information in staff meetings or making some policy decisions. In those cases, estimate value by comparing outcomes with their potential costs. For example, does it make sense to spend ten thousand dollars on exchanging information in a staff meeting or is five hundred dollars more appropriate?

3) Determine return on your investment (ROI) by comparing value versus cost.

ROI = Value - Cost

If this analysis predicts a loss, either revise meeting’s scope or cancel it. After all, a meeting, like any project, must earn a profit.

In addition, a profitable meeting will be an effective meeting.