A recent study discovered that the average American employee attends 62 meetings a month. Yet, over fifty percent of meeting time was wasted — think about all the meetings you sat in last week that were bad meetings, lacked a real purpose, or were a waste of your time. Even worse, are you, as a leader or manager, running bad meetings?

Ever thought about how to run a bad meeting? Here are eleven tips to ensure you run a really bad meeting:

• Don’t develop a purpose for the meeting. Just wing it. Whether the meeting is supposed to make a decision, inform, or provide clarity is immaterial, right?

• Don’t bother creating an agenda for the meeting. If you do create one, don’t send it out prior to the meeting.

• Start the meeting ten minutes late.

• Don’t have anyone take notes.

• Since you don’t have one, don’t state the purpose of the meeting and the outcome you desire to achieve at the beginning. Let everyone guess. It’s more fun that way…

• Wander from topic to topic. Don’t adhere to the agenda, if you have one, during the meeting.

• Talk the whole time. Don’t engage your team during the meeting even though Zoom lets you do it both by chat and by video/audio.

• If you make a decision, don’t take the time to capture it.

• Assign action items to groups, not people. Somebody will take care of it, right?

• At the end, don’t summarize the purpose and the outcome of the meeting. Let the team guess — did we really achieve anything here?

• Finally, no follow up. Since your meeting didn’t accomplish anything, no need to follow up after the meeting with written notes for both the attendees and those who can’t attend.

Seriously, though, don’t be the leader that runs a bad meetings in person, on Zoom, or some hybrid of the two.

Take the time and make your meetings effective — organize meetings only when needed, develop a purpose, build and send out an agenda, engage the attendees, assign tasks to individuals, and send out a summary. You and your team will appreciate the extra effort that you put into making the meetings matter.