Board room meetings are mandatory events that corporates conduct to discuss future agendas and other action items for their business. However, at times they become boring and leave your employees frustrated. But if they are executed successfully, they can impact your productivity and helps in accomplishing your goals.

Read on further to discover some important basics in conducting productive meetings for your business.

What pops to mind when you think about productivity killers? Social media will certainly appear among the most common answers. CareerBuilder carried out a survey among employees to figure out what factors prevented them from being productive. Nearly 38 percent of the respondents said that social media were to blame. This isn’t the survey leader, however. Smartphones are the main culprit for diminished productivity according to 50 percent of the respondents.

We live in a very dynamic corporate world and fast execution is becoming determining for employment success and the chance to experience career growth. The number of distractions, however, is also growing.

Marketing managers are among the most disciplined and committed professionals. After all, marketing management is a demanding profession requiring the intelligent applications of marketing orientation, techniques and tools in organisations for the management of its marketing resources, activities and audience.

But marketing managers are not traditionally considered effective and efficient project managers – or at least, this is the conventional wisdom. But we know otherwise because marketing managers are project managers in their own right, too, in the sense that they also manage their own projects.

Teams are made of people, and people perform the activities, tasks and steps required to achieve the desired results.

People are so important to successful project completion that a savvy project manager’s most crucial job is building an effective and efficient team for the entire duration of the project.

The team building process consists of a comprehensive set of measures designed to bring together people with different knowledge, skills and personalities into a collaborative team.

Keep in mind that diversity can be as much an asset as a liability – and the team building process results in diversity becoming a valuable intangible asset for the group.

Think about positive face-to-face interactions in the office and project site during normal working days as well as during special team building activities (i.e., trainings, workshops and seminars).

Think about using technology to foster team building, such as emails, video conferencing, and group chats, all of which are of special importance to teams in different locations.

The project management team is composed of several personalities that the project manager should learn to manage in addition to the project itself. Indeed, nothing will get done without people in a project, thus, it pays to have a general idea of the team members’ unique personalities as well as how each one fits into the team and how their traits can be harnessed for its benefit. Keep in mind, too, that the project manager should clearly define the individual roles and responsibilities among team members while also emphasising teamwork, thus, contributing to effective and efficient results.

Information that is presented in clear and concise form can have an incredibly positive impact on project management. This is why the creation of a detailed report can be determining for making sure that the project implementation has taken place in the best possible way.

Creating a project management report that is detailed enough and easy to understand isn’t one of the simplest tasks. A small detail that has been underestimated could potentially lead to problems in the future. Visibility is the key to successful reporting, guaranteeing that all important parts and pieces of the project have been attended to in the best possible way.

Keep in mind that not all of the following measures are applicable in all instances, thus, emphasising the importance of identifying the causes for the schedule slippage.

You can then take the appropriate action or series of actions.

For example, in case of specific tasks causing the delays, the better action is to add expert resources but when artificial task dependency is the one causing the delay, then eliminating it is the better option.

In this way, the project’s tasks can be done simultaneously instead of a sequence, thus, fast tracking the achievement of the desired results.

Perhaps the project is off schedule because of ineffective and inefficient allocation of resources, such as when the wrong people were assigned to the tasks or when the budget was insufficient for the jobs.

While you may have carefully studied the personal traits and professional qualifications of your team members before task delegation, you may have committed a few mistakes along the way.

What does it take to choose the right project management software? Should you focus on the price or should you pay attention to the feature? The answer is simple – both of these areas are important.

The quality of the project management software dashboard is probably one of the most important criteria to examine before selecting. The dashboard will determine usability and your ability to utilise every functionality of the product. Several other characteristics are also determining for the importance of a good project management software dashboard.

Delegation is the process of assigning responsibility and/or authority to another person on the team usually from a manager to a team (e.g., chief finance officer to accountant) for carrying out specific activities. But delegation being a core management leadership concept, it does not end with the assignment of tasks since the person who delegated the task remains accountable for its outcome – or in short, delegation and abdication are not synonymous.

Then there’s the other end of delegation, namely, micromanagement. In this case, the manager who delegated the task meddles too much in the work, usually by providing too much direction, performed by the team.

Effectiveness is about using and doing the right things to achieve positive results, while efficiency is about doing things in the right manner.

Burnout, defined as the state of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion caused by prolonged and excessive stress, saps your physical energy, leaves you feeling more hopeless, helpless, and resentful of your job and even your teammates, and reduces your productivity.

You are less likely to use the right tools, techniques and technologies to complete the project.

When you know the causes, you can effectively treat the disease (i.e., burnout) and address the symptoms (e.g., lack of interest in the tasks).

Lifestyle causes: Do you work too much, thus, you have too little time for rest and relaxation?

Do you have a pessimistic attitude toward yourself or your world?

You, as the project manager, have the responsibility of ensuring that your team members perform in an effective and efficient manner that, in turn, affects the team’s overall productivity.

You must hold the person responsible and accountable for the accomplishment of the assigned tasks within the agreed schedule and costs, thus, ensuring that he takes both the credit and the blame for its achievement or failure, respectively.

As team leader, one of your most important jobs is to motivate, inspire and encourage your members to work better, harder and smarter – and the best way to do is to lead by example.

When your team members see your unbridled enthusiasm, positive energy and deep commitment to the project, they will be motivated to follow your example.

Otherwise, you will be unable to identify and address project risks as early and appropriately as necessary.

Use Technology to Improve Productivity

Project managers and their team members dread the prospect of failure because of its personal and professional implications. But while everything that can go wrong will go wrong in any project – it’s Murphy’s Law, after all – the best project managers adopt effective and efficient measures to avoid project failure.

Keep in mind that project failure can mean different things to the different stakeholders. Project failure can mean the failure to deliver based on the agreed quality, schedule and cost, it can be the failure to yield the desired positive results for the end users, or it can be the failure to complete the project.

Project managers (PMs) each year face challenges to bring projects through to a successful completion. The year 2015 will be no different from in years past as far as this is concerned. Trends for this year within this field will include a continuation of some of the same tools popular in 2014, but with a bit more emphasis on other tools and innovations. Project managers as usual will need to be flexible enough to embrace these trends where necessary to improve their success rate. We provide you with some of the trends we see being important in the following information.

As a manager or an owner, you’ll need to have a good idea about the most important organisational criteria and the ability of employees to address those.

What does it take to identify future performers in your team?

These focus on corporate objectives and requirements for each group of employees.

The basic definition of a top performer is an employee that exhibits the most valuable characteristics in relevance to the particular organisation.

Figuring out what you need from employees and cultivating these positive characteristics will help you identify the future performers and develop their skills.

Though human input is most important when it comes to making adequate decisions and identifying the top performers, the creation of professional databases can be really helpful.

Time management, which is defined as the process of planning, implementing and evaluating conscious control over time spent on specific tasks with the purpose of increasing effectiveness and efficiency, is a concept that project managers should be aware of.

But many project managers appear stressed by the daily demands of their jobs with the most common reason being their failure to apply the principles and practices of time management.

Your time robbers may be a few of even all of the following:

Inability to refuse others even when it means adding to your workload

Numerous personal calls, texts and emails

Meetings, which are either too many or too prolonged or too far from the site