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As someone who spends at least 50% of their time in meetings, I feel quite passionately about making them worthwhile. Since I strongly believe in bringing cross-functional teams together early and often, I need to be intentional with my preparation and execution. I don’t agree with a lot of Elon’s strategies these days, but this one speaks to me:
“Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.” — Elon Musk, Inc.
While meeting etiquette may feel obvious, here are some of my top tricks to implementing quality meetings.
Pre meeting
In your invite clearly…
(1) State the goal / meeting type
By the time your meeting ends, what do you hope to achieve? Be clear about what people are coming together to do and where you hope to be by the end. Keep your goals appropriate to the time you have booked. Don’t try and solve world hunger in a 30 minute meeting, if you catch my drift.
(2) Include an Agenda
Be detailed about how you aim to get to your goal with an agenda. I’ll be honest, I look down upon and at times, decline agenda-less meetings. Show your team how you’ll guide them to their goal. And encourage others to add pressing topics to the agenda that might be crucial for this group to discuss.
(3) Include a Pre-Read
Documentation is king. Whenever you can, take a few minutes to put your goals and agenda in a doc with any additional context that’s important for the group to read through to have a meaningful discussion. At a minimum, give folks a 3-sentence overview of the background.
(4) Invite all the right people
Getting the right people in the room is 70% of the battle. Having shared your goals and agenda, encourage invitees to forward the meeting invite if there are other coworkers important to your meeting. The more the merrier model works if you have an agenda.
During meeting
(5) Make it human
Connect with your meeting attendees on a human level before you begin. Skip the lengthy ice breaker and promote inclusivity in simpler ways: turn your camera on, give people bio breaks, make space for quieter folks. Don’t be a robot.
(6) Give people context
Allow attendees time at the top of the meeting to review the pre-read materials and drop in additional agenda items. Like you, attendees are most likely context switching from another meeting. Give them space to reorient.
(7) Delegate for rotational help
Ask for help: ensure there’s someone taking notes, someone monitoring the chat (which is always lit in WFH days) and someone keeping time to ensure that you are moving through the agenda. The meeting leader cannot be expected to juggle it all. You are only human.
(8) Call it if it’s not working
This is one of my favorite things to do: If you don’t have the right info or people in the meeting, don’t be scared to end it early! Don’t waste people’s time because you have the time blocked. Plus, everyone loves time back.
(9) Outline next steps/action items
Ensure you leave the meeting knowing what happened and what’s next. The best way I’ve found to implement accountability is to assign action items. Nothing moves people to action like being assigned a task :)
Post meeting
(10) Send out notes and action items
Someone wasn’t paying attention. Someone wasn’t even there. Send out the next steps/action items to bookend the meeting with clarity in a follow up meeting. Let people know if you’ve achieved your goal or not.
Were these obvious tips? Or were they totally new? I’ve found these tips work in meetings well beyond my professional sphere. I’d love to hear how you drive efficient meetings in your organization and in your personal life. I love an agenda and I love an efficient meeting.
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