Cut Your Meeting Times in Half
Most meetings are too long. This wastes time, creates stress and — in normal times — means that more space has to be allocated to meeting rooms. Any meeting can be made more time effective by following some simple rules.
Start with a clear purpose. Unstructured, directionless conversation is not a meeting. What makes an effective meeting effective is having a clearly defined purpose that can and should be communicated before the meeting starts. Don’t try to combine too many purposes into one meeting. When people from different locations have all gathered in one place it might seem sensible to squeeze as many different topics into the agenda. With virtual meetings this is never the case and even with face-to-face meetings it makes more sense to focus on key goals and leave minor details for later calls or messages.
Manage the discussion. A meeting is not a chat with friends. Make the best use of everyone’s time by guiding the discussion so that you stay on topic and so that you end up with a clear decision. There should be one person who chairs the meeting, keeping the discussion productive. This person should state the question and then invite people to share their opinion. Always ask everyone around the table to comment, so that you don’t just hear the loudest voices. After everyone has shared their opinion the chair can then say in their own words what they think the consensus is, verifying that the participants agree.
Focus on real-time deliverables. Every meeting should have deliverables in the form of decisions. One effective way to do this is to start with a list of points that need to be decided and project that document onto the screen. As decisions are taken during the meeting the results can be typed into this template. As they are being added you can check that the participants agree with one more final check when you wrap up the conclusions. At the end of the meeting you can then share these decisions immediately, without waiting for someone to write up notes and being sure that everyone agrees.
Avoid presentation slides. Save even more time by using presentation slides only when they are essential. Most slides do not really add value to the meeting but they introduce delays as people fumble with the connection to the big screen or try to send files to each other. Presentation files also have a hidden cost of the time wasted by employees before the meeting. Sometimes slides are useful and relevant. Most of the time they are not, and by discouraging presentation slides you save time both before and during the meeting.
Follow these four principles and a two-hour meeting could easily be done in one hour. This is always important because it makes employees more productive, less stressed and more cooperative. For virtual meetings it is even more important because they are more tiring, so that a one-hour online meeting wears you down more than a two-hour face-to-face meeting.
When you are the boss you could simply define some guidelines for productive meetings and invite everyone to follow them. In cases where there is a meeting of peers anyone can simply take the initiative and propose adopting these methods at the start of a meeting, or before. Even in situations where you don’t feel comfortable suggesting new ways of working, you can still influence the direction of the meeting, asking quiet people for their opinion, or presenting your understanding of the consensus. And you can share this post with your colleagues to start the discussion about cutting meeting times in half.
