“Meetings are a good substitute for work,” writes international management consultant Jo Owen in Hard-Core Management: What You Won’t Learn from the Business Gurus (Kogan Page, 2003). The challenge is that a meeting is only as good as its participants. To make sure your meetings (and you!) are actually contributing to, rather than detracting from, your organizational  goals; follow these guidelines.

1. Keep it small.  Planning a meeting is like planning a wedding: You don’t want to leave anyone out, so you end up inviting everyone from the marketing intern to the guy in the mailroom. “There is a temptation to invite people to a meeting on a ‘just-in-case’ basis,” writes Owen. “A simple meeting of four or five people suddenly explodes into a convention, lacking only the journalists and security guards.”

   The problem with big meetings is that they’re not effective. “The least problem is the waste of time and money involved in too many people going to useless meetings,” Owen explains. “The greater problem is that the meeting themselves become less effective.” In order to keep your meetings useful and to make sure everyone can contribute, keep them as small as possible.

   If you must have a larger meeting, create a way to allow everyone’s voice to be heard. Break out into discussion groups, provide a way to submit questions for the speakers to address, or include a Q&A period.

2. Know the best format for your meeting. Not all meetings end with action items, reminds Owen. “It is often enough if all attendees learn something useful and relevant to them or their department,” he writes. If yours is a learning-based meeting, you have two options: information sharing or discussion.

   Information sharing, explains Owen, “is the land of the big presentation, and it can be deadly dull.” If you need to broadcast information to a large number of people, you may not have another efficient option. If you choose this approach, be aware that the shorter the presentation, the better.

   If you want to generate ideas and insights, says Owen, discussion is the key, and a facilitated brainstorming session may be in your future. If this is the case, remind participants that “98 percent of the ideas may be useless,” writes Owen. “That is fine. The important thing is not what you throw away; it is what you keep.”

3. Be clear about your goals. Whether you’re attending or planning a meeting, know what you want to get out of it beforehand. “Many people go to meetings passively: they go because they were asked to go. The result is that they only learn, contribute, or achieve anything by accident,” he says.

   If you’re attending a meeting, have at least one objective to achieve by its end. If you’re the planner, make sure attendees are aware of what’s expected of them.