Strategies for Effective Meetings

This is a topic I want to come to again and again. Meetings. Love them or loathe them, they’re inescapable. For senior positions, they are a significant chunk of the work hours – almost 50% in some cases. Over an entire career, some estimates indicate that one spends almost 30,000 to 45,000 hours just in meetings – that’s watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy nearly 4000 times!

For something that is a constant presence in our work lives, we should generally be adept at holding effective meetings and generally have great meeting experiences. However, the data indicates otherwise. The results from a recent HBR survey of 182 senior managers across a range of industries shows the extent of the malaise: 71% of respondents believe meetings are unproductive and inefficient, 65% said meetings are the primary reason that keeps them from completing their work, 64% consider the meetings to come at the expense of deep thinking and 62% believe meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer. In other words, bad meetings undermine the very things that meetings are supposed to enable – collaboration, creativity and innovation.

Having sat through myriad meetings throughout my own career, I have started to realize that the key to great meetings often lies in just one key ingredient: Structure. That thing often differentiates the most effective meetings from the mundane to the downright soul-sucking ones. There are of course other factors that can contribute to unproductive meetings but in most cases, meetings with a clear structure and plan almost enhances the entire experience. Here are some of the ways to infuse structure to your meetings:

Need for a Meeting

Isn’t the refrain “This could’ve been just an email” too familiar?  51% of professionals in one survey attributed meeting unproductivity to irrelevant meetings. And yet, we spend almost a third of our work week in meetings. I’ve come to realize that the only reason for this deluge is that talking feels easier than writing and that's why we tend to schedule meetings often. I believe spending some time thinking about need for the meeting vs sending an email with offline guidance is a good way of filtering out sudden urges to schedule meetings on things that can be dealt-with offline.

Setting Meeting Agenda, Objectives & Follow-up Plan

A lot of the above is well documented. Sending an agenda beforehand allows participants to come prepared on the topics to be tabled, a stated goal or objective acts as a roadmap for the discussion ensuring that all the participants are aligned with the meeting’s stated objectives. In my experience, stating a clear objective of the meeting right in the beginning is an excellent way to steer the meeting and ensure it stays focused on the outcomes expected. This ensures that the discussion doesn’t stray away from where it should focus on. In my experience, everytime I’ve outlined the objective clearly at the outset (like arriving at a specific decision at the end of the meeting, for example), the results have been great. One often neglected but equally important part of most meetings should be the follow-up mode on the actions owned as a part of the discussion. Not every follow-up needs to happen through another meeting. Agreeing to the mode of follow-ups is a good way to avoid another meeting(s), where possible.

Ensuring everyone speaks

Ensuring everyone gets to share his/her opinion on the discussed topic ensures the leader or owner of the meeting has diverse perspectives to consider before arriving at a decision/conclusion. This is also how to make every everyone feel heard and respected. The other reason is just what the data shows - a whopping 95% of meeting participants lose focus and miss parts of the meeting. People read the news, browse social media, shop, play online games, draw or doodle, etc. Establishing the need for everyone to speak and share their views & agreements/disagreements ensures that people pay attention to what is being discussed.

Long Tail of Meeting Strategies

There are a whole lot of meeting ideas I’ve gathered over the many years of my career. Some I follow and in others, I am still a work in progress, but the following seems to work for most:

• Collect feedback about the meetings conducted to get ideas on what worked and where additional effort might be needed.

• 82.9% of professionals do not consider video necessary in every meeting. 49% of respondents in the same survey indicated that on-camera meetings make them more exhausted while almost 38% consider video-fatigue as the greatest challenge in virtual meetings. Introverts are more likely to experience this fatigue, and women are 2.5 times more likely to experience video-fatigue then man. Using judgement while asking to be on video during the meetings will have better outcomes overall.

• Scheduling meetings to conclude on numbers that end in a “5” provides crucial buffer time between meetings. Instead of hosting a meeting that runs from 2pm to 2:30, making it from 2pm to 2:25pm ensures that participants can take a breather before their next meeting or just decompress.

• Short, crisp meetings are better. 52% of attendees in most meetings lose interest in the meeting after 30 minutes and 96% of attendees stop paying attention after 50 minutes. Scheduling shorter meetings ensures that most of what is discussed gets captured by the majority.

• Most employees seem to prefer meetings in the early to middle of their work week. In a survey where employees were asked what the best day for a meeting was, 29% chose Tuesday while 25% preferred Wednesday. 47% of employees considered Monday the worst day for a meeting. Friday is a close second, according to 40% of employees in the same survey. But what is the best time to schedule a meeting? This one surprised me but a study that analyzed data from more than two million responses concluded 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday is the best time to schedule a meeting!

I consider effective meetings a true reflection of the culture of a company, a measure of effectiveness of the leadership and the clarity of purpose and intent. Altering something as basic as meetings can have far-reaching implications on employee satisfaction, organizational effectiveness and the agility to act quickly in a rapidly changing technology landscape.