5 improvements for your meeting

Projects and programmes are often managed by meeting. There are meetings with teams, with management, within workstreams, etc. These meetings are used for decision making, but also for status reporting, for discussing specific topics…

Whether in-person or online, meetings are a source of complaining and frustration. It is seen as a necessary evil, an unavoidable part of doing business. But it does not have to be any of that: it does not have to be frustrating, and it also does not have to be necessary or unavoidable.

With the shift to meeting virtually, the complaints have increased. Many people consider virtual meetings more cumbersome and exhausting than in-person meetings. There are several explanations: the light of the screen that stimulates the brain more, or the perceived closeness of other meeting participants which triggers a stress reaction. The points below apply to both virtual as in-person meetings. They can hopefully relieve some of the stress people experience.

Meetings are not only frustrating for participants. It also represents an enormous waste of time and money for the organisation. Many, many meetings turn into a talking shop, with very little effectiveness or added value.

Below I outline 5 techniques to improve your meetings - the first serves as a prerequisite for the others. You cannot implement the points below all by yourself, it requires a cultural change in your organisation. But you do have the responsibility to try, if not to save the organisation from a lot of waste, do it for the efficient use of your own time.

1. Fewer meetings

The first way to have better meetings is to have fewer meetings. Nothing good comes from running from one meeting to another. This does not allow for taking the actions that have been decided upon in the meetings you had, nor is there time left to prepare for the meetings to come.

Meetings are very costly for an organisation. Just do the math: if you have a meeting of an hour with 8 people, then you have literally spent a full working day for one person in that meeting; this meeting costs one day of salary. Very often, meetings become an alternative to doing actual work. Or people consider meetings as the ideal way to get noticed by managers. This is reinforced by a seeming need to hold meetings for everything.

It is a good habit to ask yourself for every meeting: do we really need this meeting? This leads to the fundamental question: why do we need a meeting? I have written before about the Why-question in projects - the same logic applies here: what is the value of a meeting compared to its cost?

I see two good reasons to have meetings. The first one is to make decisions. A decision typically involves a tradeoff between different options. It is often more efficient to discuss the options synchronously, rather than sending documents around. It involves negotiations, which is helped by reading the room and noticing other participants' reactions.

The second reason to have a meeting is to discuss a pertinent issue, so that the different points of views can be compared, or a solution can emerge from individual contributions building upon each other.

There are also a lot of bad reasons for having a meeting. These meetings should not have been meetings, but rather an email, a phone call or nothing at all. Let me list the most common bad reasons to have a meeting:

• It was scheduled. This is the typical recurring meeting - it occurs every week or every month, and no matter whether anything needs to be discussed or decided, we just get together because our calendar reminds us to.

• To report status. In this meeting every participant in turn explains whether they are on track or not, what they have done in the period since the last meeting and what they will do in the period until the next meeting. This information is better communicated in an asynchronous way, for example by email or on an information radiator. Few people in the meeting will benefit from this information being shared with them, so they are wasting their time. Similarly, a status meeting might be one person (like a project manager) explaining the status to a group of people (management); also here there is little benefit from doing this in person. An email can be read when it suits the audience best, rather than allocating a fixed time slot to listen to the information being shared.

• To follow up on open actions. Just like with status reporting, following up on action points with people is in essence a one-on-one discussion that is conducted in series during a meeting. The participants in the meeting have little benefit from listening to other participants sharing whether or not they closed the action on their name. So, if this information has to be discussed, do it directly with the person concerned, but not in group. Again, this is probably something that can also be followed up asynchronously, in an email or a tool.

If you have fewer meetings, your productivity will increase: the time can be used to get actual work done. And the meetings that remain can be better prepared (cf. point 3).

2. Outcome focused agenda

The need for an agenda is a well known - albeit still too little used - technique for having better meetings. However, an agenda is not enough. A typical agenda lists the discussion points, maybe with an allotted time frame for the discussion. This alone will not necessarily focus the meeting on what needs to get done, nor does it guarantee an efficient conduct of the meeting.

Again, I want you to go back to the why-question: what is the purpose of this meeting? What do you want to get out of the meeting? The answer to this question will help you to draft a better, outcome focused agenda. Ideally, your agenda looks like the meeting minutes with some blank spots left open, which should be filled in during the meeting.

Your agenda should therefore list the decisions that have to be made. Maybe you can even indicate the person you expect to make the final call. That does not mean there is no room for other decisions. But making clear which decisions are needed, will focus the attention on the right topic.

When your meeting serves to find a solution to an issue, the agenda should stipulate what each of the participants should add to the discussion. This allows for the participants to decently prepare (see point 3), and it will also indicate who is really needed in the meeting (see point 4).

3. Real preparation

When you want to prepare dinner for guests, you don’t just walk into your kitchen and start cooking, without first thinking about the ingredients you need - and whether you need to go buying them. You don’t invent the recipe on the spot, coming up with a starter halfway through the preparation of the main course. Why is this then the approach we typically take when it comes to meetings?

In most meetings we may already be happy if the participants have read the agenda and know what the meeting is about (if there is an agenda, that is). Very few people come well prepared to a meeting. Of course, we are always in meetings, when would we prepare them?

Jason Fried writes in his book ‘It doesn’t have to be crazy at work’ that at Basecamp: “When we present work, it’s almost always written up first. A complete idea in the form of a carefully composed multipage document. Illustrated, whenever possible.”

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos instituted an even more rigid requirement for meetings: the 6-page memo. When you organise a meeting, you need to write out your points in six pages. The meeting starts with all participants reading the memo in silence for 15 minutes. I think this goes maybe a bit too far; certainly the reading can be done asynchronously. But it does focus very much on everyone having the same information before the meeting actually starts, allowing for a more efficient use of meeting time.

In most cases, if there is a preparation of the meeting, it typically takes the form of the dreaded Powerpoint deck. Putting things in slides is probably quicker to produce and certainly easier to project during the meeting, but it does not require the same deep thinking about your point as a written out text does. Only when you turn your different bullet points into an actual story, the loose ends become visible and some harder thinking is needed to make it all coherent. The same reasoning underpins why I started writing these articles: I have some rough ideas but only when I turn them into a coherent text will I get to the more subtle consequences.

4. Small is beautiful

Small is the keyword. It applies to the size of the audience, to the number of items on the agenda, and to the amount of time you schedule for the meeting.

You do not want to invite a crowd to your meeting - the fewer people attending, the more efficiently your meeting can be conducted. Everyone in the meeting probably has an opinion about the topic of the meeting, and they want to voice that opinion. The more people you have, the more opinions you will need to give the stage. On top of that, the more people you want to include in the decision making, the longer it will take to reach an agreement.

The simple rule should therefore be: only invite people that are necessary. Linking back to the reason for having a meeting (point 1), required participants fall typically in two groups: decision makers and experts. Decision makers are the people who have to agree with the decision, i.e. be part of the consensus or compromise. Experts have to inform the decision making, they have to clarify the options and the consequences of the options on the table.

A small agenda is a better agenda. Reduce the number of topics you need to cover in a meeting. It seems like I am contradicting point 1, but you better have more short meetings than one long meeting. The reasoning from point 1 remains: only have meetings that you need to have, if you can solve something without a meeting, that is better. But the wrong solution to fixing too many meetings would be to try to do everything in one meeting. That inevitably leads again to participants not being relevant for some topics, wasting their time while still giving them the opportunity to voice their opinions about the topic and delay the decision making. Shorter meetings are more to the point. You can efficiently deal with the topics at hand with only the right people. That is why it might sometimes be better to have more meetings.

This does not mean that you cannot combine several points in one agenda. When the audience is exactly the same, it is more efficient to treat them in one meeting. This requires really good preparation of the different meetings that are necessary (cf. point 3 again).

Parkinson’s law says that work fills the time it gets. The same applies to meetings. You can start by reducing the scheduled time for a meeting. You can even change the default meeting duration in your agenda settings: meetings you would normally schedule for an hour can be turned into 50 minutes - half an hour can be turned into 25 minutes. Very few people schedule meetings at 5 minutes to the hour, so you give people at least a few minutes to breathe before jumping in the next meeting.

5. Remember what meetings are not

Team building is important. Informal encounters are important. Checking in with people of the team is important. However, those are not reasons for a meeting. You do not need rigorous preparation when you have coffee with a colleague (unless you are responsible for making the coffee ^^). But by cataloguing everything as a meeting, it becomes difficult to know what is expected.

Social events should not be called meetings, they are something completely different. The purpose is not to get decisions or clarifications.

If you put high requirements on meetings (in line with the points above), people might get confused if these requirements only apply to some meetings and not to others. Distinguish therefore meetings from social events. Be specific in the terminology to avoid confusion. And be specific about the expectations on the necessary preparation.