Are your meetings productive?

We have all been there: the meeting that goes on and on; the teleconference where everyone sits by their smartphone; or the meeting, to put it bluntly, where a lot of people in the room are all asking themselves: ‘Why am I here?’

Why have a meeting in the first place? Why, indeed! Many important matters go forth in good order while being done by one person who is in touch with no one. Many more are resolved by a letter, a memo, a phone call or a one-to-one conversation. Five minutes with six people separately may be more effective and productive than a 30-minute meeting with them all gathered together.

No question many meetings waste prodigious amounts of everyone’s time, and for about as many reasons of historical inertia as practical ones; and many old committees are little better than tombstones to the passing of dead issues. It might save Management a good deal of time if each committee had to consider its own dissolution once a year, and had to make a case to continue in business for another 12 months. If it did little else, putting such a requirement on everyone would at least concentrate their minds on what they were for.

But on the other hand, conceding that ‘referring the matter to a committee’ can be a strategic way of delegating power, sharing responsibility, and postponing decisions, I do not wish to deny that there is a very deep human need met by meetings. Man is a gregarious animal. In every organisation and every human tribe for which we have records, people congregate in small groups at regular and frequent intervals and in larger ‘tribal’ gatherings from time to time. Where there are no meetings at work, people’s attachment to the organisations for which they work will be small, and they will meet — in regular formal or informal gatherings — in associations, societies, teams, clubs or pubs, when the work is done.

How we meet problems matters. Sometimes we have a good understanding of the issue at hand. Other times, we don’t. Sometimes we have strong spokespersons. And sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we have the right resources. Other times we make do with what we have. What is nearly always at issue is getting the best minds in the room to make decisions.

It’s obvious, for instance, that with inadequate preparation (wrong/not enough people invited, roles and specific purpose not clearly identified in advance), with no pre-defined goals it becomes much harder to make decisions and, consequently, much more difficult to make meetings more than a time-wasting, harassing and ultimately meaningless way to spend time. Yet it might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that meeting-hours now fill a growing majority of the total number of hours we spend working. How can we make sure that meetings will be more than just a time-wasting, meaningless test of patience in the future?

5 simple steps to manage meetings more effectively

Here are some universal tips for improving traditional meetings and decision-making.

1. Plan your program well in advance

Make sure it is a well-structured meeting with designated roles and responsibilities that is defined in scope and narrowed down to a couple issues. Indicate the end-of-meeting timeline, including minutes allocated to each chance for comments made throughout the discussion. Publish the agenda before the meeting (send it out, include it in the minutes, and – importantly – get input from the key stakeholders before and after the meeting so they can think through key concepts, complications and propose ideas for discussion beforehand). This will make the meeting run smoother.

2. Stick to the agreed agenda, start and end the meeting on time

Time still is money, and people respect one another when they recognise that an hour is an hour. Being asked to lead regular meetings and being subsequently recognised for starting and ending meetings promptly is a great honour. When the meeting commences, have your meeting agenda clearly displayed on the screen so participants can see what’s coming up and stay engaged. Even the most attentive people can maintain focus for only about 60 minutes at a time.

3. Make sure the right people are involved

When setting up a meeting, spend a couple of minutes thinking about who actually needs to come and contribute. More than 25 per cent of meetings are delayed by the absence of at least one or more of those who can actually make the decision, on average postponing the final outcome by as much as two weeks.

4. Be focused and present

Prepare beforehand, be there on time and attentive. Brough then. Don’t multi-task; phones and pads in the room distract you from the meeting and from your emails, web-surfing and tech-playing.

5. Continue

Sometimes it happens, after the meeting is over, that people actually remember that what has happened live. It makes sense, it is because we send the agenda before the starting of the meeting, the same way, we need to send the highlights for the participants after the meeting. It helps people to manage the responsibilities, the task allocated and date of the due. It can help to keep the track of meeting history and how far it is successful, what was the goal and were we successful in it, what is the decision made and so on.

If developing robust, creative and collaborative meeting culture is high on your list of priorities, then take a realistic look at the way your organisation decides things.

The 5 tips above will get you started. Fingertips can get you going even further. Contact us for more information or for your own training session on meeting management.