Hacks to Make Meetings More Productive and Enjoyable
Many people spend a large part of their day in meetings and many of them say that these meetings are not very effective and even a waste of time. Those two facts, people spending a lot of time in meetings and these being ineffective, mean that there is a huge potential to increase productivity by making meetings more effective. Below we will show ways to accomplish this, and thereby make every team member more productive and happier.
The way to hack meetings to make them more productive often depends on the kind of meetings. For example, the advice to make sales meetings more productive is different from the advice to make employee feedback meetings more productive. However, there are some general hacks that can be applied to almost any meeting.
We talk additional hacks that depend on the kind of meeting here:
The main hacks that we at Focus Cycles (www.focuscycles.com) have used to make our as well as our client meetings more productive are as follows:
● Clear meeting objective and agenda
● Timeboxed meetings
● Limited participation
● Regular meetings
● Moderated meetings
● Walking and standing meetings
● Post meeting recap
● Team transparency in between meetings
1. Clear Meeting Objective and Agenda
For every meeting you should have a clear objective and make sure that everyone who participates in the meeting clearly understands the meeting objective.
Beyond setting a clear objective, you want to set a clear agenda. The agenda is basically the way you split the objectives into discussion points and how much time you allocate to each discussion point.
2. Timeboxed Meetings
In addition to having a clear objective and agenda, you should make meetings timeboxed, so that you know in advance not only when the meeting is going to start but also when the meeting is going to end. This prevents meetings from ending up in endless discussions.
Often people schedule either 30 minute, 1 hour or 2 hours meetings, just because this is the most common way and because their calendar suggests it.
However, it is better to try to be precise with the time estimate. Therefore, you should not be afraid to schedule meetings that last 47, 32 or 24 minutes. This has the additional advantage that you implicitly communicate to team members that punctuality and the timely ending of the meeting are important.
3. Limited Participation
Meetings by definition have more than one participant. Sometimes it helps you to have the whole team present, especially if the objective is team inclusion and team alignment. However, generally you don’t want to have participants who have no relevant contribution in terms of giving information or making decisions. If those irrelevant members do participate it often leads to their inactivity. Therefore, before you invite participants, you want to ensure that they have something to contribute.
4. Team Participation and Inclusiveness
While it is true that you want to only invite those team members to a meeting that need to participate, if you do invite a person make sure he does not get inactive but participates actively in the meeting.
In other words you want to prevent social loafing, the tendency of a large part of participants to become inactive when a meeting has many participants.
In order to prevent social loafing you want to try to give every participant, even those that are not talking, a task. For example, let them come up with ideas and write those down.
At the same time you also need to make sure everybody’s opinion is heard and everyone feels included.
5. Regular Meetings
When you hold meetings on a regular basis, like for example, every Monday morning, or everyday at 9:00 am, the administrative cost becomes less. This is because each team member already knows about the meeting and thus does not have to reschedule work due to the meeting.
Also, if you have meetings at regular intervals you ensure that your organization does not lack the synchronous communication of meetings. You give the team regular opportunities to discuss important issues.
However, when you have regular meetings you need to pay particular attention to keeping them productive. For example, it is important to timebox them and only have a limited number of participants, otherwise there is a danger of wasting a lot of resources.
6. Moderated Meetings
You should always assign a moderator to a meeting. The moderator of a meeting ensures the following:
● That the meeting goal is clear for every participant,
● that there is an agenda and that this agenda is being followed,
● that the meeting ends on time, and
● that the participants in the meeting are active and their opinion is valued.
7. Walking and Standing Meetings
You should try to have your meetings standing or walking, rather than sitting down. In standing meetings participants stand, while in walking meetings participants walk. Both make especially sense for face to face meetings.
Walking meetings have these advantages:
● Walking helps to stimulate creativity.
● It helps to strengthen team cohesion by doing an activity together.
● It reduced the barrier between management and subordinates.
● Participants are less likely to be distracted by their smartphones.
For these reasons productive people like for example Steve Jobs have tried to get their meeting partners to walk with them. Steve Jobs used to have walking meetings around the Apple headquarters in Cupertino.
Walking meetings are hard to do with more than 3 participants, so you should keep the meeting size to two or three. Also, they are only possible if you are not in a busy city with a lot of traffic and noise.
Taking notes becomes difficult in walking meetings. But this drawback can be overcome by recording voice notes.
Face to face standing meetings are most common for very short meetings. They have the advantage that members are less likely to drift off into long discussions and instead adhere to the agenda and timing. Also, people are often more alert when standing than sitting.
Personally, even if I don’t have a face to face meeting I stand during meetings, even during long meetings, as I feel more alert.
8. Post Meeting Recap
At the end of the meeting you need to provide a summary of the meeting content and a conclusion. In most cases this summary and conclusion would be given by the moderator. The conclusion should be something tangible; it should be a decision, a plan for the next week, or a set of specific actions.
9. Team Transparency in Between Meetings
More important than the meetings themselves are the time between meetings where the actual work is being done. If in this time the team is working with a correct process, then the need for meetings is reduced.
For this to happen it is important that the whole team knows what everyone else is working on; not only during the work planning meeting but continuously every day.
This can be achieved by making the tasks for each team member visible to every other team member. Ideally, every team member can see what everyone else has been working on and is working on right now, live. This is possible if you not only plan for each week but you also assign each task to a team member and let the whole team set their daily tasks at the beginning of the day and then make their daily work execution visible to everyone else.
The above process to provide team transparency was not possible to achieve in traditional project management systems, like Asana, Jira or Trello. For that reason we at Focus Cycles had to create our own productivity software called Workiamo.
Workiamo is a Work Management Software that is based on the Focus Cycles Productivity System and is extremely simple. It is ideal for anybody that wants to be less stressed and more productive.
As you are reading this, you have earned free, lifetime access!
Register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.
10. The Meeting System of Focus Cycles
As we are a company that is focused on productivity, we have worked hard to come up with the best meeting system for our own work.
Generally, we try to avoid meetings as much as possible. Therefore, we rarely have functional meetings (decisions meetings, idea generation meetings, information meetings, problem solving meetings, team building meetings). We have found that these meetings are best replaced by asynchronous communication via chat or email, and should only be held between the people directly involved with the work at hand.
When we do have decision or idea generation meetings we will only invite a small group of people, that is dealing with the issue at hand. They can agree on the meetings between themselves.
The meetings that we have for the whole team are just two weekly meetings that are divided into a status update section and a work planning section. The meeting is limited to 30 minutes. Every issue that is not directly about what work has been accomplished or what work is planned for the next week is put off to another separate email discussion or a separate meeting. At the meeting we have a clear agenda. Every team member gets to answer 3 question:
● what has been done since the last meeting,
● and what are we doing until the next meeting and
● Is the any roadblock
The meeting has a moderator who asks every team member the questions and ensures that the only relevant issues are talked about.
At the end of the meeting we have a clear result, everybody knows what to work ok, and potentially we have feedback, and we know what everybody is working on.
These meetings are so effective because they result in a clear plan and work review that is both enabled by the productivity software, Workiamo. You can try it out yourself at www.workiamo.com.
