5 Powerful Tips for Productive Meetings
Business meetings are easy targets for ire and indignation. When they’re bad, they’re really bad. They can be unproductive, time-wasting, ambiguous, soul-sucking, inefficient, unclear, vague, chatty, and redundant. But they don’t have to be.
In episode 6, Meeting Madness 1, we learned how to make meetings better by understanding the kind of meeting you’re running. In episode 14, we learned to speed up meetings by assigning roles. And in how to lead a meeting when you’re not the facilitator, we learned to make sure everything was under control. Your control.
If I facilitated every meeting, it would be different. People who have been in meetings with me start by cowering in fear at my impressively productive approach. But they come around, and before long, every meeting becomes a model of perfectly productive process. Or else.
While it’s impossible for me (or, “glorious me,” as I like to think of myself) to run every meeting for you, here are the top five things you can do in your next meeting to make things run smoothly. And because you are glorious you, devoted to all that is good in the world, I’m going to give you 20% more things than any other top-five list you’ve ever encountered. So hold on to your hats, because it’s going to be a wild ride!
1． Have the Right People in the Room
When you’re calling a meeting, make sure you know who will attend and why. Meetings cost money. Someone is paying salaries for people to sit in a meeting. A one-hour meeting with six $80,000 salaried engineers costs around $240.
If you’re going to pay, at least make it count. Run through your proposed attendee list and ask yourself what each person will get out of the meeting. You’re inviting Sasha? Why?
Sometimes they need to be there for Reasons of Substance. Sasha needs information that will be shared. It’s a complicated issue. So sharing in person is best, as it lets Sasha ask questions and get clarification.
Or maybe decisions will be made. Sasha needs to be there to give input into the decision. Or perhaps Sasha will be in charge of carrying out the decision, and needs to understand the reasoning behind it.
These are Reasons of Substance for Sasha’s presence.
Other times, someone needs to attend for emotional reasons. They need to be part of making a decision, so they buy in to the result. Or they’re in a position of power and on an ego trip, and need to be present to get their ego stroked. Petty? Sure! Small-minded? Absolutely. And when you have a narcissistic power-mad colleague? Necessary.
2. Schedule Meetings at Odd Times
Rather than starting and ending on the hour, schedule your meetings for odd times. Like, 3:08 pm. Then start the meeting immediately at 3:08 pm.
The same way that our brains think of $9.97 as different from $10, 3:08 pm is different from 3:00 pm. People see the “08” and something in their brain believes it’s more serious, or more real, than 3 o’clock.
This also gives you eight minutes at the top of the hour to review your notes and get ready. Because of course you have notes to review.
3. Use a Statement of Purpose
First among your notes is your statement of purpose for the meeting. Every meeting needs one. It should go out with the meeting invitation. Repeat it for everyone at the start of the meeting itself.
“Weekly Status Meeting” isn’t a statement of purpose. It’s a description of the meeting. It’s a synonym for “Weekly Torture Session.”
“This meeting is so everyone has a chance to ask the team for help on a pressing problem” is a statement of purpose. It might be called “Weekly Status Meeting,” but its purpose is helping people get unstuck. Remind everyone of that and you’ll have a much more focused meeting.
4. Distribute an Agenda
The purpose is the “why” of the meeting. You also need an agenda, which is the “what.” List the topics you’ll discuss at the meeting and the decisions you’ll make. Decide how long you’ll spend on each item. Then your timekeeper can keep the meeting running according to that schedule.
Your times don’t have to be exact. You can always alter them on the fly. But the discipline of writing them down will make it clear just how many things will—or won’t—fit into your meeting.
Meetings can suck. Make them suck less.
5. End with Consolidated Action Items
There’s nothing worse than leaving a meeting never quite knowing why you’d been there in the first place. At the end of the meeting, your scribe will have made a record. Being an awesomely perfect scribe, their notes will include a list of all the decisions made. They’ll also include “action items,” things that meeting members have committed to do.
End the meeting with a quick review of the decisions made by the group. Then review the action items, so everyone knows how their lives are different, having attended.
If someone is leaving with no action items, and they aren’t affected by the decisions made, their time was wasted. If they needed to be there for political or persuasion reasons, then they needed to be there. But in terms of the difference it made to their lives, the meeting did nothing.
And here is your bonus 20% tip for magnificent meetings…
6. Wait for Electronics
And when it comes to doing nothing, there’s no better way for people to check out of a meeting than to use their electronics. Ban electronics from meetings. No email. No cell phones. If you have to take notes, do it on paper. If it’s not important enough to write down by hand, it’s not important enough to type into a distraction machine that takes people away from what’s going on.
If you can’t even imagine a meeting without laptops, give it a shot. You might find that when no one’s on their computers, you can all work face-to-face and actually get things done.
If someone is on their computer and they miss what’s going on, decide and communicate your policy in advance. Personally, I neither repeat nor elaborate on points someone missed because they were busy fiddling with their toys. Their lack of attention should not be paid for by everyone else in the room. That’s simply not fair.
You can also simply stop talking while someone is on their device, and wait patiently for them to bring their attention back to the room. Nothing is said, but the message is clear: you’re wasting our time, close your darned laptop, turn off your phone, and be part of this meeting.
While you’re busy shaming your misbehaving, tech-addicted minions, you may as well shame yourself while you’re at it. Because the only reason they were on their device is because they weren’t getting anything useful from the meeting. That’s on you, and a signal that you need to do better next time.
Meetings can suck. Make them suck less. Invite the right people. Make sure everyone knows the purpose of the meeting. Give them the agenda in advance, and stick to it. Start at an odd time so they take you seriously. End with a recap of decisions and actions. And if someone takes out their electronics, beat them mercilessly with a wet noodle until they put them away again. Then next time, do better.
Like it or not, we need meetings and communication to get awesome things done. If you want to live in the land of milk and unicorns, and get an extra 20% more tips in every top-five list, just streamline your meetings so you can work less, do more, and have a great life!