In a perfect world…
In a perfect world, your calendar application would have a slider control in the meeting scheduling interface captioned “Productivity”. The slider would have calibrations next to it, ranging from “Total waste of everyone’s time” to “Superbly productive meeting”. Anyone scheduling a meeting could select whether they wanted the meeting to be effective, and how much so.
Then again, in a perfect world, would anyone select a setting other than “Superbly productive” for their meetings? So we could eliminate the slider, and just have the default setting be the productive one. Right?
… and in our world
Alas, we live in this imperfect reality, and there is no such slider. What’s worse, the “default settings” used for calling meetings in many corporate cultures are not chosen for productivity at all, a point that was made to me by a knowledge worker I’d interviewed recently at a company where I’m helping improve meeting effectiveness. This manifests itself in many aspects of how people go about setting meetings, with many harmful effects. Meeting culture evolves when companies get started, and gets frozen when they grow large, by which time they require great energy to unfreeze and modify. If you’re lucky you work in a company whose founders had the wisdom to enforce effective meeting practices; if not, you may be paying the price to this day.
Simple ways to schedule productive meetings
Here are some practices that can make meetings effective:
- Send out a detailed agenda in advance. Incredibly, there are organizers that don’t bother; or they only send out a general list of subjects. What’s needed is a list with subjects, owners (or presenters) and times, so attendees come ready to do what they should and do it in the required time.
- Give people homework. Tell attendees what they must read, or write, or study ahead of the meeting to be able to participate effectively and hold an intelligent discussion.
- Issue meeting minutes, with action items, in a timely manner. Stress on timely: the lazy practice of sending the minutes a few hours before the next meeting guarantees none of the action items will be done in time!
- Optimize meeting duration. The defaults are multiples of 30 minutes; 1 hour is probably the most often used. Yet what’s the likelihood that whatever you need to discuss will require such round time spans? Why not go with 45 minutes, or 40, or 20, when the subjects to be discussed allow it? Every minute less is a gain, and using a time 20% shorter than you now do would force people to figure out how to actually make do with the shorter time: they might set a better agenda, adhere to it more diligently, shorten those endless PowerPoint presentations, and so on. In fact, instead of first setting an hour and then working on the detailed agenda, you could first define the agenda, and then tailor the time to it – calculate how many minutes would be required to do it justice. Of course, this requires more thought – forethought, at that, which is the hardest kind – than just plastering a 60 minute meeting on all attendees’ calendars…
- Eliminate back to back meetings. A curse we’re all acquainted with is those back to back meetings, which fill many a manager’s days. Since meetings can take place in different conference rooms on different floors, or even in different buildings in a campus, having them back to back guarantees people will be late; which messes up the start of the meeting, loses precious time, and stresses everybody. For the system to actually work you must make all meetings end five (or ten) minutes before the hour (or half hour).
You’ll notice that none of this even looks at the actual running of the meeting – that’s a subject worthy of its own post one of these days. Yet these simple practices can add a great deal to meeting effectiveness.
Not so simple: changing the culture
All these ideas seem fairly obvious and straightforward to apply, yet this is not the case. They require the meeting organizer to put in extra work; with everyone overloaded, people might prefer not to do that. The way to ensure these things happen is to make them part of the organizational culture, and that is far from straightforward; it means change, and change is always hard.
You would do well to look at how meetings are set in your company, decide what can be improved, and take the trouble to drive the change. You will need to recruit senior management support (unless you’re content to only affect the group you yourself manage). When I was at Intel we adopted the “50 minute meeting” across the company – and it was our CEO who had the clout to make us respect this norm. Once he did, 100,000 employees had a saner schedule!
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