Meetings are a crucial part of any organization, but they can also become time-consuming and ineffective if not managed properly. With decades of experience across multiple industries in companies from 2 to 20,000 people, I have seen first hand the inefficiencies and wasted time that can result from meetings that aren’t laser focused on getting the job done.
In this article, we'll explore seven practical tips that I have tried and tested to help you reduce the number of meetings and make them more efficient.
- Question the Necessity of Meetings: If anyone in the team has doubts about the usefulness of a meeting, cancel it immediately. After three skipped meetings, assess whether the meeting is still necessary. If it's not, it's time to permanently scrap it.
- Partial Meeting Attendance: Understand the nature of attendance required at a meeting. Some people are needed for the entire meeting, some only for parts. Use an agenda to identify which attendees are needed for specific parts of the meeting, and invite them accordingly. For example, if someone is responsible for a specific product during a monthly product review, have them attend only the portion of the meeting that's applicable to them. It’s usually better to do this early in the meeting when the schedule is more predictable.
- Availability vs Attendance: There's a difference between needing someone to be available and needing them to attend the meeting. If someone might be needed but it's not clear that they are needed the entire time, ask them to block out their calendar and be ready if called, but don't require them to be in attendance the whole time.
- Reduce Meeting Frequency: Try reducing the frequency of meetings. Push every meeting to half or a third of its current frequency and then assess after two iterations. For instance, if a meeting is held weekly, try moving it to bi-weekly, bi-weekly to monthly, and monthly to quarterly.
- Automated Meeting Summaries: If someone simply needs to understand what happened in a meeting, use tools like Sembly.AI or ChatGPT, along with a transcription service, to generate relevant notes and summaries targeted at their specific needs.
- Seek Consent, Not Consensus: In the decision-making process, aim for consent rather than consensus. Consensus takes much longer and leads to average outcomes. With the Consent model, take an early less informed position on a decision, and allow it to be modified as different members contribute their thoughts. The goal isn't to have everyone agree with the decision, but to allow people to veto if they feel it doesn't work for them, and to weigh in on the decision that's been proposed.
- Set “Pretty” Clear Objectives and Outcomes: Define the objective of each meeting and establish what the desired outcome is. It’s helpful to have a rough agenda to guide the discussion but make sure to allow for some free flow of ideas. This will help ensure that the meeting stays on track and that everyone knows what to expect, while balancing the need to allow creative outcomes emerge from the process.
By implementing these practical tips, you'll be able to streamline your meetings, reduce their frequency, and make them more productive and efficient.