Many managers view ineffective, fruitless, or boring meetings as an inevitable flaw in the way business is conducted. By offering suggestions for better meeting facilitation, the author challenges this presumption and shows how to stop wasting time and energy.
Evaluate your meeting facilitating skills
Accept that you may have room for improvement and seek out opportunities to improve strategically.
As an example, solicit feedback from meeting participants. If you believe that approaching them in person will skew the results, consider sending out a brief survey.
Collecting data and being open to it will raise your awareness of issues and serve as the first step toward improvement.
How to handle audio-only meetings
Because audio-only meetings can be difficult to lead, pay close attention to your format. The lack of social controls tempts participants to perform other tasks or engage in distractions while on the call, significantly reducing meeting efficiency.
To address these shortcomings, eliminate the mute button in audio-only meetings and actively address participants by name.
Idea generating technique
“Brainwriting” – Request that meeting attendees remain silent and jot down their ideas before sharing them with others. This will generate original ideas while avoiding “groupthink.”
“Silent reading” – Instead of having someone present the idea, assign 10 to 30 minutes of silent reading for a new proposal and conceptual piece. This is what Amazon employees do.
This ensures that participants evaluate a proposal on its merits rather than the presenter’s eloquence.
The signals of meeting effectiveness
When evaluating the effectiveness of your meeting, look for the following indicators:
- Are participants using their phones or other devices to multitask?
- Are some participants constantly speaking, while others are silent?
- Are you, as the leader, dominating the meeting?
Craft the meeting agenda
Simply having an agenda won’t make meetings more productive. Instead, be deliberate when creating the agenda for the meeting, tailoring it to the needs of the team, and approaching team members to ask them to add their agenda items beforehand. As a general rule, you should put as much thought into your preparation for an internal meeting as you would for one with a client.
Meetings are inevitable even if we don’t like them
Many managers view ineffective, fruitless, or boring meetings as a necessary evil of business. Instead of getting rid of meetings, use science to find solutions to their issues.
Managers must accept that meetings can be very frustrating and evaluate them to find ways to make them better. To create an effective meeting agenda, one can evaluate each step of the procedure critically.
Focus on improving meetings
For team discussions, departmental alignment, and collective decision-making, everyone must come together. However, everyone must collaborate effectively. Meetings can be aggravating, particularly when they waste time and resources as a result of a poor meeting culture.
Poor meetings should never be tolerated as the norm in any organization.
Don’t reject meetings, just be smart
There is no shortage of cynicism among employees when it comes to meetings. But eliminating all meetings would be impossible. Without meetings, you would lose touch with your coworkers, isolate yourself from other departments, and become fixated on challenging issues. Improve meetings rather than eliminate them.
Invite fewer participants
According to research, seven participants per meeting are optimal.
The effectiveness of decision-making decreases by about 10% for every additional participant above seven. This decrease can be attributed to logistics, coordination, and social issues.
Revisit your meeting objectives and determine who among your potential attendees is absolutely necessary to achieving those objectives.
Prioritizing the discussion points
Important topics for discussion should be near the top of your agenda. The same is true for items created by participants. Increase accountability by allocating agenda items to participant-owners in advance. Present the most important and demanding items first.
These topics typically necessitate a more intensive exchange and alignment period. It’s best if you start them no later than 10% to 15% into the meeting time.
A specific or odd number of minutes
The time you set aside for a meeting will be consumed. A meeting that is scheduled for 60 minutes will last 60 minutes.
To determine the best length for a meeting, consider your objectives, agenda items, and number of participants. To make meetings more effective, reduce that estimate by 5% to 10%.
Servant Leadership
Embrace the idea of “servant leadership” and the notion that you should be a “giver” who actively helps others and spreads knowledge without expecting anything in return. Businesses that have strong cultures of giving and servant leadership outperform others in all business metrics.
Avoid the negative
Meetings that are infused with humor and laughter result in more supportive team members, more constructive group dynamics, and improved team performance.
Negative comments cause “mood contagion,” which reduces performance. Attending the emotions in your meetings is an important part of meeting leadership.
As participants enter the room, greet them, offer refreshments or snacks, and play an upbeat song. Discourage multitasking.
Don’t let people get too comfortable
Change the seating arrangement: Request that participants sit in a different seat, alter the table layout, or relocate to a different location.
Conduct a “walking meeting” by taking the agenda and participants outside or on a walk through your building.
Hold your meeting standing: Participants in standing meetings benefit from the health benefits of this shorter meeting format as well as its efficiency.
The opportunity costs of a meeting
You could all be spending time working on actual projects while you’re stuck in a meeting with your coworkers. Meetings increase productivity and organizational cohesion when they are managed well by your company. When it doesn’t, they are expensive. Meetings cost the US economy approximately $1.4 trillion in 2014. Saving some of that can help leaders!
