Your eyes glaze over while dull information is delivered to you like a lecture.
You fidget restlessly and wonder why this couldn’t have been covered in an email.
And leave thinking that the entire hour was a complete waste of everyone’s time.
We’ve all had to sit through this experience.
The average UK worker spends about 23 days in meetings.
Over a month of working out of every working year.
And whilst it’s true that not every meeting deserves to be tarred with the same snore inducing brush.
This long spent on any other project would have measurable goals, specific agendas, and thoughtful planning.
Meetings should be no different.
Do you have a plan for yours?
Paved With Good Intentions
Most meetings are made with good intentions.
To give co-workers and managers the chance to brainstorm ideas.
To share problems and set goals.
Or to plan projects for the future success of the business.
When handled the right way they can provide invaluable cohesion to your workforce.
The problem is that meetings are only beneficial and productive if they're planned and managed in the right way.
But a lot of the research on business meetings suggest this doesn't always happen.
The Hard Truth
67% of employees complain that spending too much time in them limits their productivity at work.
And 95% of workers admit to frequently losing focus and missing parts of them.
These are the worrying stats from an Insight for Professionals study on meetings.
And if you think meetings are becoming a thing of the past, 11 million still take place every single day and occupy 15% of an average organization's time.
This figure has increased every year since 2008.
This Harvard Business Review only compounds the negative impacts.
A study of 20 organizations with dysfunctional meeting behaviours (including wandering off topic, complaining, and criticizing) were associated with lower levels of market share, innovation, and employment stability.
Happiness at work takes a hit too.
Another study from the same article showed that how workers feel about the effectiveness of meetings correlates directly with their general satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their jobs.
Instead of improving communication and collaboration, as intended, bad meetings undermine them.
With so much riding on the perceived performance of your meetings, putting a plan in place to ensure their success is vital.
But how? This article doesn't mince its words with the answer.
Stop wasting people's time.
A Better Way
There’s no cure-all antidote to fix the issues of every business, but following these five steps will set you on the right track and get you asking the right questions.
5 easy tips to give your meeting a purpose.
Set An Agenda
Nothing allows a meeting to meander off topic more than a lack of agenda. Planning what you'll talk about often reveals whether a meeting is even needed in the first place. If there isn't that much to talk about, could it be covered in an email?
Be Exclusive
If your name’s not down, you’re not coming in.
Ok, maybe it doesn’t have to be quite this serious, but only invite the people who really need to be there. Meetings should be inclusive, but an overcrowded room of unnecessary staff attendees wastes their time and yours.
3. Collaborate
It’s a meeting, not a lecture. Open it up to discussion and Q&A.
Get everyone involved so they feel their voice has been heard and their opinions have been listened to. Create an energy in the room. A collective understanding of the outcome. Encourage enthusiastic involvement and the energetic swapping of ideas.
4. End With a Call to Action
Finish with a clear understanding of what should be achieved going forward.
Tasking every person with a clearly defined idea of what they should be doing because of the meeting will highlight its validity and help you plan the talking points you will cover.
5. Follow Up
Track designated actions, ensure accountability, ask for honest feedback.
Don’t use following up as an excuse to hound your staff. Check in to make sure everyone is working towards the same collectively understood goals and the meeting had the desired effect. Ask for honest feedback on how they feel it went, listen to the responses you get, and be open to changing the structure in future.
Daley Habits to Help You Succeed
This meeting best practice advice comes from just one of our modules designed to motivate leaders,
improve communication, and deliver change.
Our business bootcamps equip you and your senior teams with the skills to master being more effective and drive your business forward.
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