Six Steps to Mend Your Meetings

Increase Productivity and Team Camaraderie with Simple Steps

Most of us wouldn’t head out on a road trip without gas in the car and a mapping app — at a minimum. And none of us should expect to spend several hours a week, or even every day, mindlessly sitting in meetings instead of getting our work done. Add fuel and direction to your business meetings by creating a process.

Talent managers estimate office workers spend an average of 15 percent of their time in meetings, with executives and managers skewing far upward on the curve — an average of 40 to even 50 percent.

The Harvard Business Review published a study showing that a very large enterprise with weekly executive meetings spent a collective 300,000 employee hours on those meetings in a year, when hours for business unit meetings and other team meetings to prepare for the executive meetings were factored in. Businesses and agencies can’t buy that time back.

But meetings are a fact of working life for most of us. Consider internal meetings — executive, team, all-staff and otherwise — and client meetings a meaningful process, not an inevitable chore.

At Room 214, we’ve established a meeting plan that works for us. The steps are printed out and laminated and in place in each of our conference rooms. Consider your structure and do an audit of your various meetings to see what works for your culture and team. (And consider this: An in-person chat at someone’s desk or over coffee may be a much better use of your time than scheduling a meeting!)

Here are six steps that can start to mend your meetings:

1. Be on time (if you aren’t early, you’re late)
2. Start meeting with an icebreaker
3. Read the prepared agenda
4. Designate roles: timekeeper, note taker and meeting facilitator
5. State agreements, action items and associated people responsible for each
6. End with appreciations and/or energy level check

In the end, it’s about workplace efficiency, plus treating every member of the team as an important collaborator, from the executive team to the interns. There are many studies showing that most workers and most managers think a good portion of meeting time is wasted time. Designing a process to eliminate time that feels wasted is critical.

But be a human being. Do consider time a precious gift, not to be squandered. Don’t be a jerk.

Sometimes an off-agenda item may be just the spark your team needs. Sometimes the energy levels may be sapped. Sometimes, commuters get flat tires on their way to a meeting. If it’s not a pattern, remember why you’re treating your colleagues’ and clients’ time as valuable. It’s because you value them as people.