Meeting Makeover: 4 simple checks to make the most of your meetings

Life moves pretty fast.  If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.  Ferris’ words apply in offices as well as the classes and streets of Chicago.  That’s why many business teams meet regularly on fast moving topics of high importance.  But regular meetings have a tendency to go stale or worse.

To be clear, I not a fan of meeting overload.  According to a Harris poll conducted by  Workfront (AtTask), professionals spend at least 15% of their working lives in meetings, with almost half of that of the unproductive variety.  Like many of you, I’ve been victim to some pretty tedious and unproductive meetings over the years.  So when I found my own weekly team meeting made me yawn, I applied this 4 point meeting checkup to fix the mix. 

4 Checks to a more productive meeting:

 1. Agenda: Think of the agenda as a contract.  It’s a promise to participate on specific topics with clear outcomes that are a shared priority.  Setting the agenda is a great responsibility that should be wielded wisely.  Ultimately, it’s the agenda that defines success.
2. Time: Matching meeting duration and frequency to the task and topic is an art, and needs to be constantly monitored to make sure the time spent is merited.

• Duration: Make sure you have enough time to accomplish the meeting objective.  That said, ask yourself why 30 or 60 minutes?  Remember the first 5 – 10 minutes are often spent waiting for a quorum.  Scheduling to start a few minutes later provides needed space to be present and also addresses the chronic late arrival syndrome.
• Frequency: Try to match the frequency with the need.  Daily huddle’s can be essential  in fast paced and team environments.   But many topics simply don’t mature as quickly as the cadence set by the meetings making more frequent less productive.

3. Materials: Set expectations that the agenda, reports and presentations are available before the meeting and that people will review them beforehand.  While not always possible, its great discipline to aspire towards.  This simple requirement ensures the materials are ready to be presented and clear enough to be understood without a voice over.  It also applies an approach that’s working for Kahn Academy and its’ more than 10 million students; flipping the location of your homework and class lecture at home to make the meeting time more productive. 
4. Outcomes:  This is where it counts.  At the end of every meeting, confirm with the participants that the expected outcomes were achieved.  If not, define what needs to be done to complete the tasks and include with the action items in the meeting minutes.  If you miss the objectives a few weeks in a row, it is a sign something is not working in the other 3 parts. 

Case Study in my own Meeting Morass: Focus on Frequency

After  a quick review, I found the biggest opportunity to jump start my team meeting in the frequency.  My weekly team meeting included the right people focused on the right agenda.  We looked at KPI’s, covered priority topics, and reviewed the project plan and calendar.  The real problem was that these topics had different maturity curves.  Splitting the agenda into weekly topics made a big difference in the meeting outcome and energy. 

•  Reports: While acquisition, retention, and NPS  numbers fluctuate, in the case of my team it is only worth reviewing the entire scorecard on a monthly basis. 
•  Priority Topics: The purpose here is not to take the hot items out of more regular discussion  but instead to dedicate time to focus on the biggest drivers of the business.  The addition attention helps to drive meaningful progress, reduces the potential for the priorities to distract the team in the regular workday, and also clarifies what topics are the priority. 
• Project planning: Planning requires a lot of focus to get to the level of detail necessary to understand the interrelation of deliverables, resources, and other inputs on a calendarized basis.  That said, it is often more useful to review the entire plan monthly since milestones rarely change on a weekly basis.  Dedicating a block of time also allows for the necessary level of detail at the project and a portfolio level.
•  Deep Dives: By focusing on the first three items every time, my weekly meetings rarely allowed the time to brainstorm on new opportunities.  Setting aside one week per month gave the team time to explore topics that the team feels are important. Indeed, its motivating to give the team a chance to submit topics for consideration so that they feel more connected and get a chance to work on items of interest. 

We all have regular meetings to attend, but it is clear some are more productive than others.  By applying these four checkpoints to your own situation, you can be make sure your meetings drive an outcome that is worth the effort.