Meetings start earlier than you think!
Bill: “When does the meeting start?”
Clara: “At 3pm in the conference room.”
Bill: “Ah, thanks. So I’ll have plenty of time get some work done until then 😜.”
Clara: “Yes. Do you know what the meeting is about?”
Bill: “No idea. Something with the marketing plan, I think. We’ll see.”
Clara: “Yeah, we’ll see. See you later, Bill!”
This is a typical conversation as it happens thousands of times each day in offices around the world. Meetings are a dread and a box of (unexciting) surprises to most employees. This is not good, considering most companies put their employees into meetings many hours each week.
My mission — among others — is to improve meetings and make them productive and fun! Because meetings done right can propel an organization to the top, while meetings done wrong can pave the way to bankruptcy.
Knowing when a meeting actually starts is an important question to answer on the path to more productive meetings. I will show you the perceived anatomy of a meeting and the surprising truth about when it actually starts.
Anatomy of a meeting (really?)
If you’re like most people, who are regularly dragged into meetings, you might think the anatomy of a meeting would be something like this:
- Start time
- Welcoming everyone and presenting the agenda
- Working through agenda items 1–5
- Ending 40 minutes later than scheduled
While there are already apparent problems with the chronology above, it is a different fact I want you to focus on today. The chronology above implies a meeting would start at the scheduled start time. However, the points listed are a mere fraction of the actual full chronology of a meeting! What if I told you, that a meeting starts days before the scheduled start time and likewise ends many days after the scheduled end time? Taking this broader perspective on the anatomy of a meeting is the first important step to improving meetings!
On our quest to find out, when a meeting actually starts, let’s ask ourselves: what happens before the scheduled start time?
30 minutes before the meeting
The first improvement that comes to mind is the chairman arriving 15–30 minutes earlier. This gives her time to prepare the room: set up a beamer or video conferencing equipment, venting the room, getting flip chart or whiteboards ready, arranging tables or making sure drinks are provided. It almost always pays for the chairman to arrive a little early, because there are always little things to prepare.
But is that it? Does a meeting actually start 30 minutes before the scheduled time? Or is there more? Let’s explore further.
The day before
Sometimes it’s important that certain topics are not brought up by the chairman, but rather come from the floor. The chairman can help this by talking to a participant the day before the meeting and getting his consent to to the topic and to raising it. This can prevent fruitless and emotion-guided discussions. Also if a topic is of special interest to one participant, the chairman might want to discuss it one-on-one the day before the meeting. This can also prevent ill-placed discussions, that are only of interest to a few, during the meeting. But there is even more we can do.
2–3 days before
If all participants of a meeting know in advance what to expect, the meeting will instantly be more productive! And if everyone also invests a few minutes to prepare questions, ideas or information in advance, you will already be in productivity heaven! The key to enable this is the agenda.
Creating an agenda is one step, but sending it out to participants in advance is the real productivity hack. That way everyone knows what to expect, people can decide to opt out, if they can’t provide value and those participating can think about their contributions in advance. Sending out the agenda to participants should happen 2–3 days before the meeting’s scheduled date.
Are we there yet — did we find the real start of the meeting? I think we can go back even further.
Scheduling the meeting
Wouldn’t it be better to think of the moment you schedule the meeting as the actual start of the meeting? For most participants, it is the actual start: they make room in their schedule, they think about the meeting’s purpose and they might begin to prepare information, questions or even documents.
The moment you schedule the meeting is also when you start to think about preparing documents yourself. At the very least you need to prepare the agenda. The agenda shouldn’t only be a list of vague bullet points — but that’s a topic for another article. You might also need supporting statistical or financial data ready for the participants. Try to include the objective or goal of the meeting in your invitation, so participants clearly know how they can add value to it!
The thought of a meeting
Having talked about objectives and participants: your meeting starts even earlier than the time you send out invitations! Because you have to think about these things in advance. Always be clear what your expected outcome of a meeting is: do you need come to a decision, devise implementation details for a plan, get creative ideas, have your team informed, …? Think about how you will judge the success of your meeting. Also ask the heretic question: “What would be the consequence of NOT having the meeting?”
Keeping the number of participants low is key to valuable and productive meetings. Before inviting people, think hard about who really brings value to the meeting.
Now we really reached the point in time when a meeting starts:
For meeting participants a meeting starts when receiving the invitation!
For the chairman a meeting start even before sending out invitations!
Participants need to prepare for a meeting to keep it valuable. They need to give feedback on the agenda, prepare questions and information and may even opt out if they can’t provide any value. For the chairman the meeting starts when she thinks about the objective and the participants — even before sending out invitations.
When does it end?
Much like a meeting does not start with the scheduled time on the calendar, the meeting does not end with the scheduled time.
It is important to follow through with action items and tasks from the meeting, distribute meeting minutes and created artifacts and to review the results in the next meeting. So a meeting really ends when the success of its outcomes are reviewed in the next meeting!
Conclusion
Thinking about successful meetings clearly shows us, that a meeting starts way before its scheduled time! For participants the work to make the meeting valuable starts with receiving the invitation. And for the chairman, it starts even earlier when deciding on the goals and people to invite. Keep that in mind for your next meetings, and I promise they will become a lot more valuable and fun!
About me
I am on a mission to tap into the unexploited brain power of humans! I coach and advice teams in methods to increase individual and team productivity. You can hire me through my company Dreimannzelt. I help with agile methods like Scrum, design thinking, lean startup techniques as well as cultural and organizational changes. I write on Medium to make people more productive and show them how much fun it can be.
