Make Meetings Matter Newsletter Series
According to Forbes, employees spend an average of 31 hours per month in meetings (over 4 days!) and 50% of that time is considered wasted. Although meeting ineffectiveness is a widespread problem, it doesn’t have to be if we are intentional about our meeting culture and practices. This is part one of our newsletter series created to help professionals think about the meeting culture they want to instill within their organization and provide strategies to create it.
Meetings can be a great way to build relationships, align ideas, and have meaningful discussion. They can also be a colossal drain on our time and productivity if we aren’t intentional about how we use them.
As a meeting lead, the power – and responsibility – is in your hands to ensure meetings have a purpose and drive results forward. Where to begin? Start by doing a meeting audit.
Meeting audits force you to get off the meeting merry-go-round and consider things like:
- Does your current meeting content necessitate a meeting?
- Are the right people “in the room” and are there people that don’t need to be there?
- Do all the agenda items need to be addressed DURING the meeting?
To get you started on your meeting audit journey, look at your calendar right now and zero in on the next three meetings you are leading. Ask yourself these four questions:
- What do you want to accomplish in this meeting? Decision? Brainstorm? Get input or build consensus?
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- If you are not clear on this, revisit the objective and challenge if a meeting is even needed.
- Could this meeting be consolidated with other meetings taking place?
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- For example, try consolidating meetings with the same people involved or those with related topics.
- Is the frequency of the meeting on target given the purpose and attendees? Could the cadence change?
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- For example: Full meeting every two weeks and shorter touch bases only as needed in between.
- Are there agenda items that could be communicated or started outside of the meeting so more time is focused on productive discussions?
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- Consider polls to gather perspectives ahead of meeting. Try out using whiteboards to brainstorm asynchronously before the meeting. OneNote can be a great tool to post updates, FYIs, or questions for attendees to review ahead of meeting.
Did you identify any shifts you can make?
2Connect has created a robust meeting audit process with questions like these to help you uncover what’s driving meetings and to challenge the status quo.
Ready to go deeper? Review the attached PDF above to find out more about our meetings workshops where we introduce tools like these, and how they can help you and your team reduce inefficiency and maximize your time together.
