6 best practices to improve your meetings
We spent half of our working time in meetings trying to figure out how to solve problems. The bigger the company is the more hours you spent on meetings and the question that rounded our heads at some point is: What the F**ck am I doing in this meeting?
To avoid thinking this again, in Interactius we are improving our way to do meetings. We identified which were our most common issues; late meetings, missing participants… and studied how we could optimize them.
What I want to leave here are 6 simple tips to improve your meetings, I will not say anything you haven’t heard but think if you have applied some of them in your meetings; if you do, go to the next level, start shadowing all your company/team meetings (depending on the size) and check for patterns that can be solved in a short term and let the longer ones at last.
Small improvements are easier and quicker to digest for the whole team.
1. Meetings when needed
Before creating an appointment please ask yourself two simple questions:
- ¿Why am I setting up this meeting?
- ¿Has anyone solved the problem in the past?
If you can’t answer the first question and/or the answer of the second is Yes, don’t set up a meeting, do a little research first to find by yourself the answer. We could also add another question:
¿How many time do you need?
If the answer is less than 15 minutes maybe it is better to go with a stand-up meeting and not a regular one. Maybe you can solve the issue with a coffee or in your colleague sit.
2. Prepare the meeting
We use to prepare workshops and important presentations ’cause we want to show the best of our work but we tend to forget preparing meetings as a regular base. People don’t take the proper importance to this point, this is due to the fact that we use to think that we know how to run a meeting: people sit in their chairs, listen the moderator and then give their opinion or go out of the meeting without even talking. But what happens if we change our way to do meetings and we prepare them as we should?
The answer is that we will be more efficient and lose less time on it. The idea is that the moderator prepares the topics to be discussed as a first step even before sending the invitation, so topics and tasks to be done can be included in the invitation. This also works to calculate the length and attendees of the meeting.
If we are having a meeting with clients it is also important to prepare its location and consider other little things like food, drinks and material we have in the room. Every detail is important to give a good impression.
3. Meeting points
Every meeting should be well organized so that all participants knew which will be the topics. There are ways to let others know what the meeting is about, like sending an email, writing the topics in the agenda…
4. Invite only key participants
Meetings should have the decision makers and people that will contribute. There’s no point on having colleagues in a room were they are not useful while they could spend their time working.
5. Meeting time
Why is it so difficult to correctly estimate a meeting? if you think about it, it’s only maths:
15 min x topic (I have 2 topics) is equal to 30 min.
WROOOONGGGG!!!
That’s our first thought, but the truth is: what happens with the questions and behaviors from the other participants? People use to think that everyone behave the same way, the reality is that each of us has a different perspective, manners and sometimes culture, so you have to consider this when you schedule a meeting, to avoid wasting time to explain what you have in mind or run out of time to finish the meeting, because it can lead to participant’s frustration.
The last but not the least to consider is that a meeting longer than an hour without breaks is a neural killer and attendees attention will drop more than half.
6. Meeting minutes
The idea is that after each meeting the moderator or the notetaker could send a summary of what has been agreed with the tasks assigned to every attendee or team. What we want to achieve with this is to give meetings the importance and propose they have. it’s also the way to have all the team/clients paddling in the same direction, avoiding misunderstandings.
Is important that once this mail has been sent all the participants confirm they agree with all the points, that way we make sure all the attendees have been read the minutes.
The perfect meeting doesn’t exist, there’s always room for improvement.
These are only tips you can follow to improve your meetings, if you want to extend your knowledge I recommend all of you to read this book “Meeting design: For managers, makers and everyone”, it has been an inspiration to enhance our internal methodology and to write this post.
