Are Your Meetings Productive?
By Alex Archibald
First of all, let’s get one thing straight: meetings are not the work. Anyone who has stared down the barrel of a day full of meetings knows this to be true. Meetings facilitate the work. Meetings organize and delegate the work. Meetings are a collaborative space to discuss the work. But in almost all instances, meetings are not where work gets done. Does this mean meetings aren’t valuable? Of course not! It does mean that you should be deliberate and thoughtful when planning meetings to make sure they’re productive and help work get done, not hinder it. How?
Have a Goal
Why are you calling this meeting? What are you trying to achieve? If your goal is simply to share information, ask yourself, “Does this information need to be shared in person or can I write an email?” I promise you that your coworkers will love you if you opt for an email when an email will do. If you don’t know why you’re calling a meeting that probably means you don’t need one.
Tell Everyone What the Goal Is
The best way to have a productive meeting is to give everyone attending the opportunity to properly prepare for it. So use that description field in your calendar invite; attach a document if it’ll be helpful. Clearly state the purpose and goal of the meeting so you don’t have to spend the first five minutes of the meeting explaining it to everyone.
Have An Agenda
This is particularly important for larger and longer meetings to keep people on track. No need to get too fancy with it — bullet points will do. Add times/timing if you think it will be helpful. If the purpose of the meeting is an update on project status, consider developing a status document that can guide the conversation and keep everyone on track. (Who knows, if you and your team commit to updating this status document regularly you may negate the need for a meeting entirely!)
Stick To Your Agenda
This one sounds obvious, but all it takes is one derailed meeting for you to realize how important this is to a meeting’s productivity. Tangents are bound to happen from time to time, but if the conversation deviates from the meeting’s purpose and agenda, rein it in. Jot down the tangent and agree as a team to address it at another time.
Review Actionable Items
Everyone who leaves your meeting should know what they need to do next. End your meeting with a review of any and all actionable items that came up and decide as a team who will be responsible for executing them — and what the timeline is. You can even include this in your agenda! Love to see a “Next Steps” section on a meeting agenda.
Be Exclusive
The people who attend your meeting should be the people needed to achieve your meeting’s goal. Only those people. No more, no less. Think about it this way, the more people who are in a meeting, the fewer people there are doing the work. A meeting’s attendance list should be essential personnel only. Worried that other team members will miss out on what was discussed? Add as an actionable item sharing the meeting’s details and outcomes with secondary team members.
Keep it Short
So you’ve booked a 30-minute meeting and ten minutes in, you achieve your meeting goal. Fantastic! Now end the meeting. Is the meeting a failure for not lasting its pre-appointed length of time? I hardly think so. Seems to me like you’ve had an efficient, productive meeting that allows everyone to get on with their day and get back to (that’s right) the work. Here’s the thing, the clearer your meeting purpose, organized your agenda, and specific your guest list, the shorter your meetings are likely to become. Funny how that works, eh? I’m also here to change your life by telling you that you can change the default length of your meetings in both G-Suite and Outlook. Why automatically book an hour when most likely half that will do?
Focus on the Meeting
I’ve attended a lot of meetings where every attendee arrives with their laptop, sits down, and proceeds to work on other projects instead of focusing on the task at hand, namely the meeting. First of all, this might signal that the meeting is unnecessary, or that some of the people invited don’t need to be there. Second of all, it draws the meeting out and frankly, is rude to the other people in the room. For most meetings, it’s brainpower that is required. Your Slack chats and inbox can wait, you’re in a meeting now. Worried about taking meeting notes? Consider making one person the note-taker, and make one of your meeting’s actionable items the sharing of those notes. If you and your team can manage to focus solely on the meeting and its outcome, you’ll get there a lot faster, and then can all get back to work.
A couple of common-sense tactics can take your meetings from meandering to meaningful, keep your team and your projects on track, and be an efficient use of everyone’s time and resources. Now go forth and meeting plan! …Unless an email will do.
Alex is the Social Media Marketing Team Lead at VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
