Meetings in the workplace are unavoidable. After all, nothing significant happens alone. Meetings are an opportunity to get people at work together to seek their input, collaborate with each other and inform them of progress. Most meetings, however, are not effectively run, thus making the experience of meetings in general poor.
According to you, what makes a meeting ineffective?
0%No agenda or flow to the meeting
0%Lack of preparation
0%No post meeting actions and follow ups
0%Incorrect people invited to the meeting
You can vote for more than one answer.
There is lots of research available that corroborates the need for having effective meetings. For example, one such research tells us that out of 182 senior managers interviewed, across various industries: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. While 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. Further, 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. And finally, 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.
Employees up and down the organisation spend hours of their week in ineffective and sometimes pointless meetings (some of these emails could have been an email). Unnecessary and ineffective meetings are the biggest drain on employee's time. This time, could surely be spent on work that leads to outcomes.
Through this blog, we will share 3 important tips to help you run your meetings more effectively. In fact, you could even ask others in your organisation to follow these tips to ensure that other meetings you attend are also effectively run.
3 tips to help you run effective meetings:
Create a structure
Invite input from your participants
Pre-read and post meeting summary
Let's dive into the details of each of these tips.
Create a structure
An unstructured meeting is one that has no agenda, no flow and no outcomes. Nobody likes an unstructured meeting. Nobody likes to be sitting in a meeting, not knowing what is going to come up next. An important aspect of running effective meetings is to make your participants comfortable. After all, you are asking them to invest their time for a meeting that you are calling. Hence, it is important to provide the participants with an agenda in advance of the meeting.
In some instances you might even want to ask your participants before hand for their input on the agenda. Maybe they could suggest a better flow, or the addition of a topic to be discussed, or even inviting another person to the meeting based on the agenda.
Elements of the structure of the meeting include the agenda, time limit against each agenda item, who will lead each of the agenda item discussions and what the expected outcomes are for each agenda item. In some cases, you might also include 'rules for the meeting' (an example of this could be - if you need to take a phone call, please exit the room first). This structure, when circulated in advance with your meeting participants will give them a level of comfort and preparedness so that you get what you want out of the meeting - their attention and their input.
Interested in learning how to run effective meetings? We have a workshop for you.
Invite input from your participants
Think about he following questions:
- What is the objective of the meeting?
- Why are you inviting people to the meeting?
- How did you select the participants for the meeting?
Answers to these questions will always lead you to the same point. You are asking people to invest their time in your meeting so that you can get them to participate by giving their input, giving their consent, giving feedback or simply being present. Since this is such an important aspect of the meeting, it is important to create an environment within your meeting to ensure that all participants feel comfortable participating.
You do not want any participant to leave the meeting feeling like they have wasted their time, or that their input was not listened to. You might want to think of a further rule for your meeting like - 'Only one person speaks at a time'. Some participants might be hesitant or nervous, or even afraid to speak out in a meeting setting. Sometimes you also need to be able to invite participants to speak out. This is only possible if they truly believe that you have created a safe meeting space where they can contribute.
Pre-read and post meeting summary
Another important area where most meetings fail is in providing participants with pre-read material and post meeting summary.
The pre-read material is critical for the participants to know what is going to be discussed. They can also use this to prepare for the meeting so that a 2 hour meeting can be compressed to a 1 hour meeting. Preparation also means that the inputs from the participants will be well considered and thought out. So, not only did you save time, but you also got better quality input from your participants!
The post meeting summary is an important tool that helps you 'close the loop' on all discussion points. Remember, this is a summary and not a ball-by-ball update of who said what. Keep the summary limited to outcomes, actions, follow up dates and ownership and all your participants will feel that their time has been well used.
At Unlock More, we run training programs to help organisations pivot into running effective meetings. Running effective meetings will help save your organisation time and also create an environment where colleagues look forward to meetings.
