Do you look forward to meetings? (Yes, we know you just spit up your coffee when you read that.) Most people find meetings to be overly long, boring, repetitive and lacking concrete outcomes. Given how much of our work lives we spend in meetings, this issue of poorly designed and executed meetings should be a crisis!
Don’t worry. We got you.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers recently posted 3 Strategies to Change your Workplace Culture by Changing Your Meetings. They say that using these three meeting strategies will help create a culture of collaboration, shared leadership and trust:
- Identify purpose and time frame for the meeting. Know why you’re having it and how long people need to commit.
- Co-create the agenda on the spot. (Humanergy says co-create the agenda in advance so everyone can review inputs and prepare in advance.)
- Run the meeting with defined roles, like meeting host, agenda item facilitator and note taker.
- Humanergy’s bonus meetings strategy: Always, always have defined outputs (what will be achieved) for every meeting – and for every agenda item. Here’s a sample agenda item from one of our recent meetings:
- Input = Review article XYZ
- Agenda item = Discuss article application to our training
- Time estimated for item = 20 minutes
- Output = Align on implications and future actions, with accountability and time frame for completion
Implement these four strategies, and you’ll have fewer, better meetings.
Have a meeting method that really works? Comment below or message us.
Want to learn more about making meetings a favorite part of your day? Sign up for High Impact Leadership Training – the whole 12-session series, or just the bits you need most.
Thanks for the article! Our company uses EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) as our business model. Baked into this system is what is called the Level 10 meeting – weekly meeting for a team/department. I have taken this meeting agenda format to other organizations on which I serve as committee chair or board member and have found it works wonders! For a one-issue meeting, you simply leave off the “reporting” and “to-do” section of the meeting. Check out this quick video of how the Level 10 meeting works (by the way, the name “Level 10” comes from the fact that at the end of every meeting each participant ranks the meeting 1-10 with 10 being excellent and a “Rock” is simply a project). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmV6_fH5NkU
Thanks for your thoughtful comment and helpful link. Do you want to mention a teammate and be entered to win a free copy of “What Great Teams Do Great: How Ordinary People Accomplish the Extraordinary” for both of you?
Few changes we have implemented in our meetings this year:
1. Revisit the audience – Don’t invite 100 people to a meeting, if only 5 are going to have inputs, invite ONLY those 5.
2. Send meeting minutes after the meeting – the other 95 can be copied here for information.
3. Include agenda in the meeting invite – If more than 50% people haven’t responded to the meeting invite, it means either the agenda was not clear, or they didn’t think it was worthy of their time. Revisit Point # 1.
The above changes have tremendously reduced the number of meetings we attend and have improved the outcome of those we attend.
This sounds like a great step-change and undoubtedly has saved time AND money. Meetings done well are actually helpful and even enjoyable. Thanks for sharing, Anurag!