The vast majority of leaders and teams don’t want another meeting. Yet much of our work depends on intrateam communication and cross-functional collaboration. Here’s what we learned about meetings that don’t work, and some ways leaders can make meetings more collaborative and productive.
Most Meetings are a Waste of Time
If that’s how you feel, you’re far from alone. Harvard Business Review found that 71% of meetings are considered unproductive by employees, suggesting a widespread issue in meeting management across industries.
In another report, Forbes found that professionals were spending more than 30 hours per month in meetings that were ineffective and unproductive. If leaders’ charisma or willpower made meetings more productive, we’d be having a different conversation. Mindful leadership is a must to break through boredom and (only) have meetings that matter.
4 Strategies for Collaborative Meetings
1. Create an agenda.
Effective, collaborative meetings don’t just happen. You need a plan: an agenda that doubles as a springboard to collaboration. Your agenda should include a purpose, a process for achieving that purpose (progress steps), people who are going to enact that process, and a product or result. Here’s an example of how a marketing agency might build their agenda.
- Purpose: The purpose of this meeting is to develop a messaging guide for our rebrand next quarter.
- Process: To achieve this during the time allotted, we will use this meeting to clarify 3 core services offerings, and define how each of those services helps our clients run their business better with some messaging “main ideas”.
- People: Jim (Marketing VP) will attend to facilitate the messaging portion of the meeting. Sara (VP Sales) will make recommendations for services offerings to focus on, and facilitate that part of the discussion. Tyrone (CEO) will outline and assign action steps once messaging and products have been agreed on.
- Product: By the end of this meeting, attendees will have agreed on 3 service offerings to focus on during the rebrand, and the core messaging (1-2 main ideas) driving sales for each product.
Once you’ve built an agenda that works, use it as a template you can customize to different departments and teams. Build on previous meetings or organizational shifts as you move through phases of your project. And don’t forget to send the agenda out ahead of time, so attendees can build it out with what they plan to cover/outstanding blocks, lingering questions, and so on.
2. Include action steps whenever possible.
Your action steps should go beyond having another meeting. Of course, not everything can be solved in one meeting, but you should go into each meeting with action steps for each attendee, and a clear plan for when and how to follow up on those action steps.
3. Co-facilitate to develop leaders.
Collaborative meetings are a great opportunity to develop leaders on your team. If someone is the lead on a project, or the primary point of contact for a department, have them facilitate the portion of the meeting related to their action items and area of expertise.
4. Use tech strategically.
Automated notetakers and transcribing tools can save time when running collaborative meetings. They can even help you keep track of meeting metrics like who brought up which idea or how many questions were asked. But remember, tools like these are supports for collaboration, not a replacement for it.
Keep in mind that for sensitive/proprietary information, it may not be appropriate to transcribe or record all meetings. Check with your HR and legal departments about the best and most ethical ways for your organization and industry to use these tools.
Evaluate: does this meeting matter?
Choose some metrics to track for each meeting that can help you gauge whether it’s a good use of time, especially if you plan to have it as a recurring meeting. Lucid Meetings suggests tracking things like:
- Attendees: How many people invited actually attended?
- Timeline: Did the meeting start and end on time? Did the topics on the agenda require more/less time than allotted to discuss them well?
- Did all attendees contribute ideas to the meeting? This includes the run-up to the meeting if you sent the agenda out ahead of time, and conversation during the meeting?
- Action Items: Count the number of action items and decisions made. Are any action items assigned in previous meetings completed or progressing? Have any action items or plans become irrelevant?
Use meeting evaluations not just to schedule more, but to schedule less. If you’re noticing a particular project is stalling or blocked, pause for a while and shift to other priorities.
Don’t be afraid to cancel meetings if they’re redundant or irrelevant. If you can tell people are burned out on meetings, cut back. Schedule what’s necessary to keep the lines of communication open, and trim the rest. And don’t forget to give your team kudos during and after successful, collaborative meetings.
Ready to have productive, mindful meetings?
You don’t have to keep scheduling meetings that feel like they are going nowhere. Click here and download our Leaders’ meeting guide to help you create your collaborative meeting agenda. If you want help making them stick with your team, let’s talk.
For Further Reading: