Meeting Culture

Have you ever counted how much time you spend in meetings each day, and how much of it is time well spent? In other words, is what you get out of a meeting worth the time you put into it? I’ve pulled together some tips that may help you make better use of that time. They fall into three groups, depending on whether you’re attending a meeting, organizing it, or in a position to influence how your company holds meetings.

General

• An employee who spends most of their time in meetings can easily come up with work, but will struggle to do it and have even more trouble checking that it was done. They won’t have the time. Make the time spent in meetings count.
• Everyone should be able to reserve an uninterrupted block when nobody can schedule them for a meeting. If you can, ban meetings across a particular time slot, such as 10 to noon or 1 to 3.
• Poor information flow, or an organizational structure that makes it hard to delegate, can lead to overcrowded meetings. I once saw a funny example. Halfway through a meeting a manager walked in and said, with a straight face, that he had been passing by and, given who he saw in the room, wondered if he ought to join as well.
• Ask employees whether they feel they spend more time in meetings than doing their actual work. Look at how big meetings usually are and do a retrospective. How many people were invited? How many were actually needed? Did the information get where it needed to go?
• Make calendars visible so people can see at a glance who spends how much time in meetings. Some jobs call for more meetings than others. Anyone whose calendar is booked from morning to night five days a week probably hasn’t learned to delegate attendance. If they really do have to be there, they often become a single point of failure whose absence is critical to the whole system.

Attending a meeting

• Learn to say no to invitations. If that’s hard for you, set your calendar to decline automatically. If someone invites you, you decline and they never follow up, they probably don’t need you there. Ask yourself whether your presence is essential. If you’re unsure, ask the organizer for details or simply decline.
• Automatically decline meetings with no clear agenda or purpose. You can chat over a beer or at lunch. Burning an eighth of your workday on it isn’t especially efficient.
• If you’re likely to take a phone or laptop so you can keep up with other work, you probably aren’t all that important to the meeting. Decline with a clear conscience.
• Review the agenda and prepare. Sometimes ten minutes will do. Sometimes it takes several hours or longer. Preparation also naturally limits how many meetings you can attend in a day.

Organizing a meeting

• Invite only the people whose presence is essential. Let them decide whether to delegate. A few hours before the meeting, check that everyone has accepted or found a substitute.
• Allow time to prepare. Don’t set up a meeting half an hour in advance. Nobody will have time to prepare or ask someone else to go.
• Don’t invite whole chunks of the org chart. I need Ferda Vomáčka, so I’ll invite his boss, and his boss’s boss for good measure.
• A one-hour meeting takes an eighth of every attendee’s workday. If you’ve covered everything, finish early. Don’t keep people in the room to discuss “a few other things while we’re all here.”
• Feel free to ask people who came just to sit there to leave. You can usually spot them by the laptops they open and stare at from beginning to end.
• Put care into the agenda and meeting description. Explain what people should bring and what they should expect to take away. It respects their time and gives the discussion some structure.
• At the end of each meeting, make sure you’ve reached a conclusion and that everyone knows what it is. It can be as simple as agreeing that you reached no conclusion.
• If the meeting turns into an argument or drifts off the agenda, step in and get it back on track. If you’ve reached a dead end, call it off.
• Write up the outcome of each meeting and send it to everyone who took part. A good write-up lets you share the information with people who weren’t in the room.
• If you run a recurring meeting, ask the people you invite whether the original reasons for it still apply and whether they find it valuable.

A meeting ought to be the most efficient form of communication. Agree on some ground rules for attendees and organizers, or it can turn into a spectacular waste of everybody’s time. I hope this helps improve the meetings you attend, even a little. If you think of another rule, please share it in the comments below.