This Is How a Great Meeting Should Look Like

You only need to look at how a company conducts its meetings to understand the company's efficiency. Meetings that start late, ramble around with no clearly defined goal, and are continuously full of personnel doing nothing are likely to be managed in the same fashion as the company.

While everyone knows that terrible meetings waste too much time, not many people know that they may also harm your company culture and bottom line.

 

Why is your meeting culture important?

We should consider meetings as an expense. Like other expenses, we should keep the costs low and the output high. However, far too often, organisations hold expensive and ineffective meetings.

Research says executives today spend about 23 hours per week in meetings. According to one Microsoft study, 71% of meetings had no clear outcome or useful next actions. Another poll of 182 senior managers conducted by Harvard Business Review confirms this finding, adding:

• Meetings prevent 65% of people from doing their own tasks.

• 64% claimed that attending meetings prevented them from doing "deep work" (the ability to concentrate without distraction on a cognitively demanding task)

• Regarding getting the team closer together, 62% of respondents thought meetings came up short.

The modern CEO spends an average of more than 16 hours per week in a black hole of pointless meetings, causing a ripple effect that disrupts their total productivity, severely impacts their morale, and does little to help with team-building.

 

What makes an excellent meeting culture?

According to the same Harvard Business Review study, changing your attitude to meetings can dramatically impact outside the conference room; strengthening your meeting culture can contribute to a perceived rise in team collaboration and productivity, psychological safety, and staff satisfaction.

A healthy meeting culture encourages conversation, fosters teamwork, and drives results. It is:

• Accountable: Everyone has a role and a responsibility, and everyone follows a code of conduct that includes timeliness, respect, readiness, attentiveness, and engagement.

• Objective-driven: Setting a plan with clearly defined goals and discussion topics helps keep the meeting on course and distractions to a minimum.

• Efficient: Meetings should last no more than 15 minutes, close to the maximum attention and memory span. Assigning someone to keep a tab on time can help move things along.

• Honest: If the meeting aims to gather opinions and solve problems, everyone must be able to speak out and make proposals without fear of backlash or belittlement. This is commonly referred to as psychological safety, an essential part of high-performing organisations.

• Actionable: Each meeting should conclude with a complete understanding of what has to be done, who is in charge of each item, and what each item's deadline is.

 

4 warning flags of a troubled meeting culture & how to fix it

Meetings are not the enemy; it is lousy meetings that are. But how do you tell if your meeting culture is in danger? Here are some warning signs:

 

1. Your schedule is jam-packed with meetings.

If you're a middle manager, you probably spend 35% of your working week in meetings. If you are in upper management, that figure can rise to 50%. That's a lot of time taken away from work.

Consider having two blackout days each week where no meetings are permitted or keeping your most productive hours (such as mornings) regularly free for you to concentrate on work.

And the next time you plan a meeting, consider whether there is a more time-effective alternative, such as an email or an open-ended survey. Employees will naturally begin to take face-to-face meetings more seriously if they are only arranged when absolutely essential.

 

2. Your meetings are constantly running late, and nothing seems to be done.

If a meeting finishes with no clear conclusions or next steps, you've just squandered your time - and everyone else's.

Make sure your meetings have a clear plan and explain expected outcomes ahead of time so attendees may come prepared to work toward a shared goal. Tie everything together in a post-meeting email that specifies everyone's roles for clear responsibility.

 

3. Every meeting has far too many participants.

Have you ever left a meeting wondering why you were invited?

Inviting the correct individuals to a meeting is just as crucial as defining the agenda. 

Each participant should be assigned a position, such as decision maker, consultant, recommender, or executor. Take anyone off your invite list if they were included as a backup or "just in case" person.

One theory holds that between five and nine persons should be present for meetings to function at their best. Any longer, and productivity suffers.

 

4. Most of the group sits around while a few people talk.

The most popular cause of ineffective meetings is inattentive attendees. To combat this, use live polls to keep your participants interested, which can also serve as a decision-making tool for voting on follow-up measures and future steps.

 

Ultimately, employees need to view meetings as well-planned and beneficial rather than inefficient or distracting.

Meetings that are well-run are where attendees communicate, ideas are debated, decisions are taken, and assignments are allocated, in other words, where real work is accomplished.

 

Source: Pigeonhole live