My friend Ted Farr posted this in his blog.  Oh so true!!  These are the top 3 reasons staff meetings stink.

1. No set time limit for the meeting.

Average managers rarely announce an ending time. Staff members arrive later and later, thinking to themselves, “This meeting is going to go on for 90 minutes.  Why torture myself by waiting for it to get underway?”
Weekly staff meetings also don’t have to last 60 minutes.  If they do, you either have too many people in the room or one person with enough hot air to make up for everyone else.
Set a limit. Try 30 minutes. If you need more that, it could be a sign you’re relying too heavily on staff meetings to get information.  Maybe you need to remove your middle-aged spread from the bottom of the chair more often during the week and conduct more management by wandering around.

2. No agenda.

When there’s no agenda, there’s no control.  When there’s no control, there’s no buy-in.  Eventually, when there’s no buy-in, there ceases to be a company.
Kinda like the butterfly effect, no?
A fixed agenda, sent out 24 hours before the meeting, symbolizes your commitment to getting the important stuff done without wasting the staff’s productivity time.  It gives the introverts in your department time to mull over what will be covered so that they can contribute to their highest level.  And it keeps things on schedule (see #1).

3. Appropriating staff meeting time for brainstorming.

You can usually pinpoint the introverts in a staff meeting by the way they slink down in their chairs when someone says, “Let’s do some brainstorming to come up with a great idea for this next campaign/brand/magazine ad.”  The only thing worse is the phrase “quick brainstorming.”  Brainstorm OUTSIDE of staff meetings.