Being in back to back meetings is nothing to be proud of. Don’t waste your precious talent in pointless meetings.
Avoid horrors like this…
Sounds familiar?
You have ten full-time team members. Each one attends four internal meetings a week, booked into the diary for an hour each, because Outlook does that automatically. They usually start five minutes late because some people are coming straight from another meeting. One meeting regularly over-runs by twenty minutes and another one, a project update, could be replaced with a snappy two-minute video.
The real killer: the time it takes to get back to real work.
Ofcom say we check our phone every 12 minutes. It is so easy to get distracted when we come out of a meeting. We grab a coffee, have a chat, look at our inbox, check WhatsApp, get absorbed by social media or a newsfeed. People report that it takes up to twenty-five minutes to get back into the zone (measure it yourself to see).
That’s over 200 minutes wasted per person per week and over 33 hours a week wasted across the entire team.
That’s the equivalent of having one team member work on Mondays only, then take the rest of the week off. From Tuesdays to Fridays your headcount is down to nine, not ten. No wonder they say they have too much work to do. They are always a man down because of your meeting culture.
You don’t waste your money or any other asset like this!
That’s why training your employees to run meetings effectively is one of the best investments you can make.
We allow relatively junior people to invite us to meetings, feel it is impolite to turn down the request, then turn up to an agenda-less free for all, without the information we need because we’ve no time or information to prepare.
There’s rarely a consequence if someone hasn’t completed the actions they said they would. We go off topic and too often empty vessels make the most noise.
The real decisions get made afterwards, in the meeting about the meeting, often upsetting some egos in the process.
Here’s some rules to put into practice:
- More than three in a meeting or conference call? Don’t attend if there isn’t an agenda. Otherwise you need another meeting to provide the information that came up in the discussion. If you are invited to a meeting without an agenda say ‘sorry, I just don’t have capacity for that, but please email me the action points after the meeting.’ Explain that you need to prepare all the information required so a decision can be made. That’s the purpose of a meeting: to make decisions. If it is all FYI stuff, then share the information in a different way. No agenda, no meeting.
- Change your default meeting time to 45 minutes instead of 60.
- If you are invited to a meeting with too many attendees, go round the room at the beginning and ask them to say who they are and why they are here. If there is no reason for them to be there, or they don’t know how they can contribute, then release them. They’ll be forever grateful to you. Change your culture to respect your own and other people’s time.
- Why invite so many people? Decision making reduces when more than seven people get involved.
- Start on time. Don’t re-read the papers if people are expected to have prepared in advance. Or schedule time at the start of each meeting for people to study the information before the discussion starts, telling them in advance what the decision is they need to make.
- Start by asking ‘what are we trying to achieve here’ in order to align priorities.
- Be choosy about the food and ambiance. You are setting the context for professional decision making, not a photo for Instagram. I’ve spotted a link in some boardrooms between waffle and carbs.
- Teach people to chair meetings: to manage distractions, set the context, keep to the agenda, state the objectives, encourage collaboration, manage difficult personalities and encourage opinions from the people closest to the problem who often have the best solutions, but may feel intimidated to share their opinion.
- Finally, don’t go in the meeting room unless you are clear on why you are there and what you want to get out of it. People tell me their boss has suggested they go to a meeting, but when they get there they find it is a complete waste of time. Just say ‘I’ve checked it out but it doesn’t fit with my priorities’.