8 Tips for More Productive Meetings
How to make meetings great again—explained with Dilbert comics.
Given the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic, most of us are working from home for an extended period of time and having more meetings than ever before.
Read on if you’ve ever opened up our calendar for the day, and felt your soul crumble at the sight of a full day of back-to-back meetings.
Having more productive meetings would reduce overall meeting volume, and make them less of a chore to attend.
Despite meetings being essential to our work, most of them tend to be unproductive. Studies have shown unproductive meetings waste over $36 billion year over year.
After conducting tons of research on this topic and reflecting on the good & bad meetings I’ve attended over the years — I’ve compiled the 8 practical tips to make your meetings more productive!
1. Make sure the meeting has an explicit goal
Having an explicit goal and agenda ensures the meeting accomplishes what it sets out to do in the allocated amount of time. Otherwise, we risk leaving the meeting without tangible outcomes or action items.
This often leads to yet another meeting down the road which could’ve been avoided.
Before defining the meeting goal, we need to first validate whether or not a meeting is the most effective method of accomplishing the goal.
Here’s a helpful flowchart to determine whether or not a meeting is needed.
Most meeting goals can be divided into the following categories: asking for feedback or getting approval, alignment, making a decision, and sharing information that requires immediate follow-up action.
Otherwise, in most cases when communicating an update — a meeting isn’t necessary.
I’m sure we’ve all heard “that entire meeting could’ve been an email”. Having a well-defined meeting goal that the attendees agree with helps avoid these kinds of situations in the future. Regardless of what the meeting goal is, make sure it’s clear, and all attendees are aligned.
2. Create an agenda and share it ahead of time
A proper agenda can decrease meeting time by up to 80 percent. Despite this, over 63 percent of all meetings don’t have explicit goals or agendas.
Agendas are essential to productive meetings because it helps set expectations for the attendees, allow attendees to add agenda items if needed, and help estimate how long the meeting should be.
Take stock of the most common kinds of meetings and create an agenda structure or template that works best for the team & its immediate collaborators. The agenda should break down what needs to happen during the meeting in order to achieve the meeting goal.
It’s also important to give your attendees a heads-up if you plan to call on them to present or share a large amount of information during the meeting so they have adequate time to prepare.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen the “deer in headlights look” when the facilitator calls on someone out of the blue to present something they weren’t prepared for.
Generally, meetings should all start with a round of introductions if there’s even a single person that the others might not know, and be followed by an overview of the agenda, and the statement of the meeting goal.
Afterward, it’s important to reiterate the next steps, and let the attendees know where the decision log and meeting notes are documented — but more on that later.
3. Keep a decision log
A decision log outlines the important decisions made during a meeting. It’s important to explicitly write these down, in case there’s confusion or disagreements in the future.
It can be as simple as a few bullet points or an elaborate table. Regardless, all important decisions made need to be noted down, along with the context of how the decision was made, and those who made the decision. Understanding when certain decisions were made, and why they were made allows the team to revisit and re-evaluate them in the future.
Keeping a record trail of these decisions also allows us to avoid situations like “When did we decide on this? Who made this decision? What was the reason for this decision? When looking back on a project several weeks later.
4. Ensure there are explicit action items with owners & timelines
One of the most important things after a productive meeting is to ensure there are explicit next steps. These action items should be tied to the meeting goal, assigned to a specific person, and due at a specific deadline.
Otherwise, the meeting outcomes end up being ambiguous, and attendees are unsure of who is responsible for what, and what needs to be accomplished before the next meeting.
It’s a good practice to discuss if there needs to be another meeting after the action items are complete, and when that meeting should take place.
5. Make sure there’s a host facilitating the meeting (and someone to take notes)
You need a facilitator to run the meeting. I cannot stress this enough. I’ve been to numerous meetings where we sat in awkward silence or endured small talk for 10–15 minutes before someone stepped up to lead the discussion.
In most cases, this is the host who called for the meeting in the first place. He or she is responsible for establishing the common goal, writing the agenda, recording the decisions made, and driving the action items & assigning owners + timelines.
In addition, it is also a good idea for the host to enlist someone to be the note-taker. Afterward, the meeting notes, along with the decision log, and action items are shared with all attendees and other immediate stakeholders.
Depending on how large the meeting is, some of the key responsibilities of the meeting host include: writing an agenda, creating the meeting invite, marking optional attendees, sending out a pre-read, and giving a heads up to those who might need to present or share information.
6. Invite the right people, and state which attendees are optional
As illustrated in the previous flowchart, don’t call a meeting until you know which attendees are essential. Having a meeting without a critical attendee almost always results in an unproductive meeting.
An essential attendee might need to share important context or contribute to making a decision, whereas an optional attendee might be impacted by a decision, but doesn’t need to be there to weigh in.
On that note, it’s also important to mark which attendees are optional, and which are critical. In most cases, non-essential attendees join meetings out of fear of missing important information. Studies have shown that the most productive meetings, tend to have 5–8 people.
Assuming good meeting notes, decision logs, and action items were taken — optional attendees should be able to catch up afterward on their own in less time than the meeting itself.
As a team member, you should also feel comfortable in declining meetings when there isn’t an agenda or if the agenda doesn’t seem relevant. Don’t be afraid to ask for the meeting notes after declining a meeting.
7. Ensure all attendees are coming in with the right amount of context
It’s important to ensure that all attendees coming into a meeting have enough context to fulfill their role, whether or be contributing to decision-making or achieving alignment. A good practice is to create a short “pre-read” for all attendees to read in advance before the meeting.
When writing the “pre-read” I generally assume the reader has no context coming in, and build up the context from scratch. This ensures all attendees come with a sufficient level of understanding. Furthermore, whoever is forwarded the “pre-read” can follow along without getting confused.
For smaller meetings where writing an entire document might be overkill, I tend to set up quick 5–15 minute chats with attendees to help fill in the bits of important context they may be missing.
Following this tip can help us avoid scenarios where someone shows up without context, asks for an overview of the topic, and delays the entire agenda.
8. Make sure all attendees are prepared & have a chance to speak
In over 80 percent of meetings, 2–4 people dominate the entire discussion while most of the other attendees are either left out or not focusing on the topic.
A good host should ensure there are enough pauses and breaks in between topics to ensure the attendees who might be less outgoing have a chance to speak as well.
It never hurts to take a few seconds to ask “does someone have something to add to this before we move on?”.
As strange as it might sound, I’ve also seen a lot of success when big meetings have a designated “speaker object” (e.g. a marker or tissue box) where the holder is the sole person allowed to talk at a given time.
This prevents interruptions and people from talking over each other. When someone wants to talk he or she raises their hand, and the person passes the “speaker object” to them afterward.
A virtual approach to this that has worked well is for the speaker to have their video turned on as the “speaker object”, while the other attendees have their videos off. Some video calling programs also have a “raise hand” feature, which has been helpful as well.
Now that a lot of us are working from home, the volume of meetings has shot up, therefore having productive meetings is more important than ever. I hope these tips were helpful! I’d love to learn about how you keep your meetings productive in the comments.
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