Nine Tips to Better Workplace Meetings
If we were honest, we would admit that meetings are a drain on the workplace. Meetings have been especially villified during the pandemic and the great reset, as employees start to trickle back into the office. In one large US-based company there were a total of 300 thousand meetings in a single year with costs estimated at 1 billion dollars. Data from the Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics reported that executives spent upwards of 18 hours a week in meetings.
Twenty-five to fifty percent of those meetings were considered a waste of time as self-reported by the executives. Even senior management meeting agendas were described as unfocused, undisciplined and ad-hoc according to one publication. Furthermore, less than 5% of senior leaders surveyed said that there was sufficient discipline at their meetings to focus on the most important strategic issues. Taken together, it’s no wonder that meetings were ranked the number one productivity killer according to a U.S.- based survey conducted by Salary.com http://bit.ly/sevenstepstoeffectivemeetings. Employees are hungry for better meetings.
Capitalize on making the most of your team’s time, bandwidth and ingenuity.
1. Challenge the need for having meetings at all.
What is the goal of your meeting? Meetings are ideally suited for strategic planning and idea generation. However, if the purpose of your meeting is for information sharing, I would recommend you reconsider your decision to hold a meeting. Update and status meetings are particularly notorious time-wasters. A recent survey by Harris Interactive reported that 40% felt status meetings were a waste of time. Perhaps even more telling, 57% reported multi-tasking during status updates. In my experience, employees disengage when they don’t see how they can contribute. Cancel your next update meeting and rely on your customer relations or knowledge management system to access this data, allowing everyone on the team more relevant, just-in-time access.
2. What active role are participants playing?
Are participants making an active contribution to the event or are they simply sitting at the table as idle and perhaps reluctant observers? If attendees don’t have a clear active role to play, make their attendance optional, allowing these folks to contribute meaningfully to your organization in other ways. Attendees who have been invited as an FYI would be better served by receiving a copy of the meeting minutes or a summary of the decisions made rather than attend the meeting itself. Everyone required to attend needs to be clear about what they are expected to contribute.
3. Cap attendance.
One study presented in Decide and Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization by Blenko, Mankins and Rogers demonstrated that decision-making is optimal with seven people around the table. Increasing this number of meeting participants leads to a swift decline in decision-making effectiveness. The authors also state that meetings of 17 or more result in no decision-making.
4. Bring in an outside facilitator.
It can be challenging for the meeting leader to handle both meeting content and process. This can be particularly difficult to manage when you are close to the issues at hand and you have a vested interest in the outcome. An outside facilitator can take this process work off your hands to help you and your team get to the heart of important issues. Depending on the nature of your work and budget you may want to select someone with facilitation skills within your organization, who isn’t so close to your specific business.
In other cases, hiring an outside facilitator may be the best use of time and resources. Jennifer Chan, Founder of Design Exchange, admitted that she and her team had tried to self-manage through a number of strategic planning sessions. She asked me to come in to help facilitate her long-term strategic plan with her team. Two, half-day sessions later and Jen’s core team had all that they needed to take the entire process back in-house. Jen remarked that they could never have made that kind of progress on their own.
5. Hold stand-up meetings.
Given all the time we are on TEAMS and ZOOM standing meetings can be a necessary time to stretch our bodies and minds.
When I first started my career, more than 20 years ago in the hospital sector, my office was a converted hospital room. The office was so large that our entire department of 12 or so could fit comfortably for meetings. By comfortable, I mean standing. As a team, we made efficient use of our time together and there was a sense of excitement in our regular huddles. Team members are more inclined to get to the point when they are standing. The added bonus is that the greater blood flow to the brain leads to better creativity and collaboration.
If you want to take standing meetings to the next level consider…
6. Hold walking meetings.
If you have a one-on-one meeting with a direct report, your boss, a colleague or a client, try a walking meeting. We all know that our best ideas come when we are walking, so capitalize on this knowledge. Your have a more productive meeting, get a bit of exercise and if you can get outside – with the added benefit of an enhanced mood for the rest of the day. In her recent TED talk, Business Innovator, Nilofer Merchant said: “fresh air drives fresh thinking ”. Who doesn’t want a little more fresh thinking at work, particularly in meetings?
7. Create meeting WOW – “ways of working”. Creating rules for the meeting engagement may seem obvious there isn’t a meeting where I have attended where we have found differences in interpretation regarding meeting conduct, such as how to define confidentiality or what constitutes active listening.
Spend five minutes in your next meeting talking about creating shared meeting values. For consideration: under what circumstances would checking e-mail during the meeting be appropriate, if at all? How will conflict be respectfully handled? What does active participation look like? This common frame of reference will invite participants to engage more actively and decisions will be made with greater ease. As an added bonus, developing ways of working will have a positive impact on your decision-making abilities. According to Ury, Fisher and Patton, in their seminal book: Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, you are far more likely to come to a consensus when meeting participants have had an active part of designing the meeting process.
8. Flip the meeting.
Send out spreadsheets and other documents in advance. The meeting isn’t a good time to be pouring through an exhaustive set of documents as a group. Instead, make it clear what you expect participants to do with this information and how long of a time commitment it will take. Based on human nature and packed schedules, I’d recommend asking people to contribute no more than 60-minutes to prepare. Otherwise, as I have seen, people will forgo the pre-work and try to “wing-it” during the meeting.
This provides you as the meeting leader, the opportunity to create a succinct summary of the data during meeting to help everyone in attendance refocus on the key issues. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, this may be a signal that you don’t know the data and issues well enough.
Flipping the meetings will ensure that there is ample meeting time for important discussions, brainstorming and decision-making. While this approach won’t reduce the overall time commitment for meeting participants, it does allow participants to schedule the pre-work component into their workflow in a way that works best for them.
Here are nine strategies you can use to make your meetings have the impact your organization deserves.
1. Challenge the need for having meetings at all.
2. What active role are participants expected to play?
3. Cap attendance.
4. Consider bringing in an outside facilitator.
5. Hold only stand-up meetings.
6. Hold walking meetings.
7. Create meeting WOW – ways of working.
8. Flip the meeting.
Here is your invitation to try just one or two suggestions from this post. If you want more help with creating a positive meeting culture in your hybrid or remote team or organization, feel free to contact me.
