8 Rules To Productive Meetings

  Meetings. One of the most dreaded and wasteful activities in most organizations. At least, when they are not done right and don’t have the right focus. There are many types of meetings starting with presentations & training, workshops, all-hands, regular status meetings, quick stand-ups or decision making meetings. They fulfill different purposes. Some are meant just for sharing information, some are meant to trigger discussion and some will provide a forum for making decisions. So what can you do to make these meetings painless, productive and really powerful? There are couple of basic rules that fit those needs most of the time.

1. Have a goal - and communicate it clearly in the invitation. You should be as specific as possible, like “The goal of this meeting so to decide what we have for lunch today,” or “At the end of the meeting we will have a decision on what to have for lunch.” Having a goal keeps you focused and sets the expectations of the audience. It will also enable you to show at the end of the meeting that “it was successful because you reached the goal and decided that today we get chicken” and thus participants will feel good about the time spent.
2. Invite the right participants – and no one else. It is important to ensure that people on the meeting have a vested interest in the topics. To follow up the lunch analogy, what is the point of inviting Petr if we all know he doesn’t eat lunch? The more the merrier slogan doesn’t apply to meetings. The bigger the audience the less gets done. The only exception are meetings with purely informational nature where you want to present information in one direction only.
3. Have an agenda – and send it out together with the key information in advance. It will allow everyone (including you) to prepare. It will also allow the participants to raise their hand in case of missing topics. “Attached to the invitation is a menu from our favorite restaurant, please read it before the meeting so you are prepared for the discussions.” If you want to move fast and get things done you need to give people chance to prepare.
4. Time constrain the meeting – begin and end on time. Be mindful of everyone’s time. If meetings drag for longer than planned you will lose focus of attendees as they will be thinking about their next thing. “The meeting will be held on Tuesday at 10:00 and will finish 10:25.” It might be a good idea to allow people time to move from one meeting to another and thus don’t schedule for 1 hour or 30 minutes but rather for 45 or 25 minutes.
5. Prepare – do as much work ahead of the meeting as possible. Prepare the structure, the important questions, you may even draft an outline of the meeting notes and fill in the blanks during the meeting. Share any documents or powerpoint slides before the meeting so people can study them in advance and prepare their questions. If I chair a meeting and need to focus on both the content as well as organization I tend to put even my own thoughts on paper before the meeting so I don’t forget important points I want to make.
6. Focus – don’t get the meeting derailed by adding too many topics or getting into too much detail. If there is something to be discussed between limited number of participants then take it offline. “Team I understand that some of you want to grab a beer after the lunch, please take it offline after the meeting.” And end every item with summary of the outcome to make sure everyone is clear on what was agreed.
7. Keep list of Action Items – and identify who is the owner of each of them. Meeting without a list of decisions made or things to do will feel like waste of time. Even in meetings that are purely informational you can provide participants with a task (for example to distribute the information to their teams) so they don’t forget the meeting ever happened when leaving the room. The reason why meetings have bad reputation is that too many of them end up without call to action and with participants forgetting what was discuss the moment they leave the room. And that truly is a wasted time.
8. Follow-up - send notes outlining any important decisions made and list of action items as a reminder for participants on what needs to be done. “Team, as we agreed we meet today at 11:00 in the restaurant and will get a chicken with rice.” Aside of the content discussed on the meeting you may want to get feedback from participants on how to improve future meetings if they are repeated ones.

Meeting without a goal, agenda, good preparation, focus, list of action items and follow-up is called a coffee break.

Obviously not every meeting needs to follow this outline but the standard ones focused on sharing important information and making decisions should. For those coming from software development world you may want to consider adapting a concept from SCRUM called daily stand-up meeting also to activities not directly related to writing software. In this meeting the participants meet for no more than fifteen minutes to discuss briefly the work done, the work ahead, and the obstacles to remove. Participants, who have their skin in the game, do it while standing to force everyone to be brief in his or her input. It is very organized and focused event. When done regularly and the right way it brings enormous value to the team without wasting too much time.

I would also suggest you think hard about what type of meetings you truly need. I would suggest eliminating status update meetings altogether and focus the time when people get together on making decisions. Status updates are more easily and conveniently shared in writing anyway.

More on topic of Leadership and Productivity:

The Less Work You Have The Longer It Takes

8 Email Mistakes You Make Every Day

The Puzzle Of Performance Goals

How To Make SMART Goals Smarter

How To Manage Your Manager

You Can’t Lead Without Values And Principles

You Are A Leader, Not A Messenger. Act Like It!

100 Days In New Management Role

How do you run your meetings? Or did you found a way to get rid of them altogether?

Photo: Unsplash / Pixabay.com

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