Profesional meetings between colleagues, clients, study group or employee sometimes can waste time more than gaining information. Other than draggy time-consuming meetings that could’ve been an email or the meeting was done in a nonconductive way that would not capture your listeners’ attention.

Here are 6 tips to keep your listener more engage and understand your meeting more potently.

1. Keep information pack and clear

The audience are much likely to stay in and hear more if the first 30 seconds of the conversation is engaging enough to participate in. Point out the main reason for the meeting and look up at the problems and work. Keep things simple and direct when writing or speaking to your team, it’s best to explain your topic with relevant matters.

Try not to drag into too much of personal stories that will take up too much time, its good to share experiences but try not to stray away from the morals related to the message. Stay focused on the goal of your message and open up problem-solving discussion or feedbacks with everyone in the meeting.

2. Do not multitask.

Multi-tasking will cut your attention away and makes you lack of focus. You can’t communicate effectively when you’re multitasking and getting distracted with another task. Put down your phone and put it in silent mode. Make sure everyone has their attention on you when it’s your turn to voice out your opinion.

3. Be inclusive with everyone

Always listen and speak to everyone in the meeting. Use “I,” “we” and “you” to give your communications for a warmer, more emotional connection. Do not point out someone’s weaknesses in front of the group and instead have a personal meeting with one to one or with a smaller circle with appropriate people involved.

4. Avoid negative body language.

If you’re having a webcam session or meeting up face to face, try to keep a relaxed and smiling face on. Speak in a natural calm yet bright tone. Crossing your arms or legs, avoiding eye contact, showing dissatisfied facial expression will turn the mood of the meeting sour. Plus, it also reflects on how you handle work matter professionally as a team. Yawning during a conversation might signal something correlate with ‘boredom’, so make sure you have enough sleep or rest before having a group meeting as it helps to keep you more focus too.

5. Listening and giving feedback

If you want to be heard, you have to always listen to others too. Allow others to talk or give feedbacks and acknowledge it. Giving out constructive criticism with an idea of other solution or adding more supportive facts is a better way of telling how to improve the suggestion instead of criticising without a solid reason why.

Thank you is a powerful word where it shows you acknowledge their inputs and energy to spend their time. Even if you do not agree with the same point saying thank you shows that you’ve respected someones perspective and vice-versa. If it is at any point you might have said something wrong, always apologize indicating what you’ve done and a solution to it.

6. Do not waste time

Taking a long time to explain the surface of the project is wasting time. Try to plan what to bring in to the meeting and give a handout a day before so your meeting mates would be more prepared during the meeting and understand better beforehand. Instead of, use the time to explain more of the important points regarding the topic. Keeping a shorter time during a meeting will also increase focus and allow listeners to remember more of the content delivered during the meeting. All the time saved are better used to spend time executing tasks.