11 Tips to Productive Meetings

Behavior >

Posted by: Chris Gelbach
Date: December 16, 2014

If you work in an office, there’s a good chance you’ve wasted a lot of time in bad meetings. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“If companies are in meetings a lot, it’s a sign they’re not aligned,” says David Gray, founder of the design consultancy XPLANE. “It’s a sign that they’re not coordinated. It could be a sign of a very political environment.”

Gray says that 90 percent of meetings can be eliminated when organizations use tools like a Kanban board with sticky notes to coordinate work by dividing tasks into to-do tasks, in-process tasks and completed tasks columns. Software services like Trello can help teams accomplish the same thing remotely.

“Meetings are great. It’s the bad ones that suck,” says Jon Petz, author of “Boring Meetings Suck.” (Wiley, 2011) “Meetings are where we collaborate, where we make decisions, where we have record-breaking new ideas.” It’s the default Monday morning and information-sharing meetings that can suck the life out of teams.

For more effective meetings:

  1. Define a clear meeting purpose and outcome. “If you can’t articulate the purpose of the meeting, then it’s probably not necessary to have the meeting,” says Gray.
  2. Send pre-read materials within an agreed-upon period of time in advance of the meeting.
  3. Invite only those who can contribute meaningfully in the “to” field and “cc” those who need to know about the meeting.
  4. Politely decline a meeting or press for more information on why you’re needed there if you don’t understand how you or your team will add value.
  5. Engage the people you want to participate in your meetings by writing them into the agenda. “You want people coming there with ideas, not just searching their brain for ideas while they’re there,” says Petz.
  6. Come to meetings prepared or don’t come at all. “Otherwise, you’re going to waste everyone else’s time going back and reading the pre-read materials,” says Petz.
  7. Follow the ten-minute rule. If that critical decision-maker you need there doesn’t show, reschedule.
  8. Visualize all ideas in the meeting with sticky notes, diagrams and line drawings. “The less stuff people have to keep in their heads, the less distracted they’ll be,” says Gray. If you give a PowerPoint presentation, provide hard copies so that people can take notes on them.
  9. Have someone take notes or minutes that include action items and deliverables, and post them to a public drive after the meeting.
  10. Keep the meeting short – preferably an hour or less – unless it’s a meeting people are flying in for.
  11. Provide food. “Biological triggers happen when people are eating food together that helps them become closer and more bonded,” says Gray.

Tags: meetings, tips, prepare