How to have productive meetings

There are many things that can scare an employee, like the coffee machine that stops working, the colleague next booth forgetting to put on deodorant or a simple “Facebook Jacking” by someone who puts on is his colleague facebook: “I like PHP”.

While these may be frightening events, there is nothing more frightening than a meeting. There are two types of meetings, the planned and the unforeseen, and both have their quandaries.

When asking people what their limitation is to do their job in the most effective way, the answer most heard is time. The worker usually spends most of his time doing deep work and the rest is spent on management work. And it is the management of this second time that we will talk about in this article.

This time is run by the managers and/or boss. The management schedule is different from the employee, since they typically schedule their work in blocks of an hour or half an hour. With that, it’s easier to call a meeting or conversations during the day. Sometimes those aren’t really helpful for the rest of the team and some managers will schedule meetings only for their anxiety problems. They want to ensure that progress is being made and that can be really demotivating for the team.

Meetings can stink. So, how to avoid it?

• Meetings should only be initiated if there is an established purpose and a desired outcome: Never schedule speculative meetings, where the basis is: “with some luck, we can get something positive out of this”. All participants in the meeting should know what points to discuss and what objectives to withdraw at the end of the meeting. If necessary, do some previous work before the meeting. Although it seems that we are adding more lost time of deep work, this will save us time in the long run.
• Define a time limit: By setting a maximum time at the meeting, that time should not be exceeded. I guess I’m stating the obvious, right? It’s not that simple, because there may be issues that popup and weren’t on the agenda, or the conversation between team members has extended. This could happen. In this case, the meeting leader will have to ask the team if we can continue beyond the allotted time, or if they want to schedule another day. Never forget that people’s time is their life. Also, while people are there, they are not producing value for the company.
• Make people accountable: As the duties of the meeting are taken away, the meeting leader should indicate who is responsible for what, and at the end of the meeting reaffirm the responsibilities of each person in order to give the members of the meeting one more opportunity to give their opinion or clarify doubts.
• Focus: The purpose of meetings is not to catch up. That’s what breaks, lunches and beers after work are for. It may seem insensitive at first, but people will respect their boss more if he imposes those guidelines.
• Start and end on time: Start and finish on time. The meeting leader may say that he respects the time of the people there, but it is the actions that show whether that is true. If in this case, the leader of the meeting is your boss, he must not forget that it is he who will influence how the meetings will behave in the company. If he creates the idea of being late and spending the pre-established time limit is okay, he shouldn’t be surprised if that happens to him. The boss creates the company culture. He creates expectations, and has to live up to those expectations.
• Cancel recurring meetings: They may even have started out as important, but somewhere in time, they lost their importance. Sometimes it’s easier to turn to the meeting with the thought “Maybe something will come up”. Re-evaluate their importance, and adjust them accordingly.

Here are some tips I got from listening to the Accidental Creative podcast, episode “How to have better meetings”. I hope it helps with your day-to-day work, and share it with your team leader, office manager, product owner or even your boss. There is always room for improvement.