Some Meetings Are a Waste of Valuable Time

How to Lead Effective Team Meetings

How do you feel after a three-hour meeting that had no moderator, no set agenda, half the people came late and now your day is half gone and your pile of work still awaits!

Very draining to say the least.

Meetings: A Necessary Evil or Your Organization’s Secret Weapon?

We have all attended meetings. Some good ones and some are straight out bad!

Many employees dread going to the office if their calendar is full of meetings. So why would this be the case yet meetings provide a forum for valuable conversations?

Well, most employees dislike meetings simply because a good number of them can be mind-numbing, accomplishing little and wasting valuable time. Yet this does not have to be the case.

The last thing you want is for your team to feel like meetings are wasting their time and keeping them away from more important work. However, employees do appreciate effective meetings that accomplish goals and drive results.

Team meetings serve many purposes: decision making, brainstorming, sharing information, or even coaching. They build camaraderie, connection, and direction for your team.

Team meetings are a key component of any business. It is therefore important that employees know and understand what’s happening in the company and what expectations they need to meet in order for the company to be successful.

 

Why Effective Team Meetings are Important

• Help make better and faster decisions
• Build stronger relationships
• Creates alignment
• Facilitates creative thinking and innovation
• Promotes inclusion in the work space
• Improves employee engagement
• It’s a good channel for feedback and helps create a culture of continuous improvement

After the effects of Covid -19, there are organizations that still have employees working remotely either on a hybrid concept while others have gladly taken up remote working.

In this regard, in order to build a high performing team, meetings are a powerful tool for communication which helps teams to simultaneously connect, especially when working remotely.

Effective meetings are more than a well-articulated meeting agenda.

It requires identifying a purpose or goal for this time, involving the right people, making decisions (and action items to follow), and most importantly, avoiding the dreadful “should have been an email” meeting.

In order to have a meeting that leaves your team feeling empowered and energized, managers should consider adopting the below tips.

 

PRE- MEETING

1. Ask Yourself If the Meeting Is Really Needed
   While we have identified that having a purpose for a meeting is important, it is necessary to justify the need to book for a meeting. For instance, if a meeting is reserved so that the team can only share some information or reports, maybe an email would do work in this case.

2. Only Invite Relevant People

It is important for a manager to consider who needs to be in attendance of the said meeting. It may seem smart to simply invite the whole team, but that is not always the best idea. Before inviting attendees to a meeting, think about the following roles:

• Key voices – Those who are there to share their viewpoints and form the decisions
• FYIs – Those who should be there to listen because the decisions made will affect their day-to-day or a project they are working on.

If the meeting objective does not involve some team members, there is no need to waste their time by having them attend the meeting.

It is understandable to want to keep everyone “in the loop,” but if a participant won’t benefit from a meeting or add value to it, then their time is better spent by focusing on their work. Should something relevant come up during the meeting, they can always be looped in later.

 

3. Set and Send the Agenda Prior

A meeting invitation should always be accompanied by a meeting agenda. The meeting agenda should outline what your team will do throughout the meeting and what objectives they aim to achieve.

The agenda should be distributed to each team member ahead of time. This helps to ensure that:

• All attendees are accountable for coming prepared to the meeting
• Meeting participants can add in new agenda items or context to existing items
• As a manager, you can better prioritize what is discussed during the meeting

 

4. Have a Defined Goal for the Meeting

It is important to identify what you hope to achieve out of the meeting. Every meeting should have an objective which should be clearly communicated with the rest of the team attending the team. This can be easily added to the agenda or calendar description.

If you are uncertain of the goal, you could try to answer the question – “At the end of the meeting, I want our team to…” 

 

5. Decide On the Meeting Time and The Meeting Duration

The purpose and topic of the meeting dictates the duration of the meeting. The meeting should not be longer than it has to be in which case, the participants will walk away feeling like the meeting was a waste of time.

For daily stand-ups, 15 to 20 minutes should be enough to quickly touch base. Meetings that happen less frequently, like weekly, bi-weekly or monthly sessions may need more time. Plan to set aside at least 45 minutes to an hour for these meetings or longer depending on the agenda.

It is also important to decide how much time should be spent on each agenda item. Setting the time expectations for each item will help identify how long a whole meeting would take as well as keeping the contributing participants in check in terms of time.

 

6. Set and Communicate Expectations for The Whole Meeting

As a manager, make sure to be crystal clear about what is expected of the meeting participants. This will be helpful to the team members to ensure the most productive and collaborative meeting possible.

For instance, advise the attendees to ensure they have had a look at the agenda, let the participants know well in advance if they are required to prepare something and in case it is an online meeting, notify the attendees if cameras need to be on etc.

 

7. Assign Meeting Roles

In order to run productive meetings there are a few things to be done such as making sure everyone is heard, note taking, time keeping and staying on the agenda.

Meetings are a great way to delegate these responsibilities to different team members, making the meeting run smoothly while also teaching the team how to lead and take ownership. The main roles include:

• Leader: In charge of creating the agenda and picking a place and time for the meeting. They should also find when everyone on the team is available and send the meeting invitations with the agenda included ahead of the meeting. During the meeting, the leader guides the group through the agenda and maintains a positive environment. At the end, they state the next steps and assign action items.

• Recorder: In charge of taking down action items, conclusions, and decisions. After, they write, organize, and distribute the notes.

• Timekeeper: In charge of ensuring the meeting stays on schedule. They assign certain timeframes to each part of the agenda. During the meeting, they alert the group if time is running out for each part. They also manage visual aids (slideshows, screen-share, etc.).

 

8. Have the Appropriate Tech in Place

Even as people get back into in-person work, as an organization that may still have a hybrid option, it is important to ensure that you can still accommodate remote working employees.

Provide these employees with a way to join the meeting either by Zoom, Google Meet or any other available online meeting option. The link to the meeting should be sent well in advance to ensure they are prepared to attend the meeting.

DURING THE MEETING…

1. Start on Time

Participants should not only be accountable for coming prepared to discuss what is on the agenda, but they are also accountable for showing up on time.

In case people show up a couple of minutes earlier, as the manager running the meeting, you could engage the team in a little small talk where you could ask them- how they are, what’s new, what they were up to for the weekend; just to start getting the team engaged in an easy way.

Ensure this doesn’t cut into the meeting time.

 

2. Keep to the Set Agenda

It is absolutely important to stick to the set agenda because it helps to keep the meeting on track and in turn, more productive and effective.

Participants want to know that the agenda will be adhered to. They are less worried about the meeting running overtime or getting derailed with things that should really be dealt with outside of the meeting, not during it.

 

3. Prioritize Collaboration, not Reporting

A meeting offers the opportunity to have interactive and thought provoking conversations. A sign of a fruitful meeting is the amount of team work that happens during the meeting. It should be a session to share accomplishments, goals reached, and upcoming initiatives.

Some of the information shared during meetings such as reports can easily be sent to the team via email for them to review ahead of the meeting. This helps them to come prepared with their research-backed conclusions or opinions.

Meetings should be for bouncing informed ideas off each other on how to overcome obstacles and plan for future projects. They should also be for planning for team management and decision-making. The team should leave the meeting knowing they accomplished something important.

 

4. Engage All Your Meeting Participants

As a manager leading the meeting, you need to ask for your teams’ input. It is essential for you to encourage everyone involved in a meeting to speak up with their thoughts, give status updates (when necessary), and share ideas and feedback.

Granted, there will always be people who will shy off from or are uncomfortable speaking up during the meeting. It is important to follow up with them toward the end of the meeting and ask for their input directly. They will still feel grateful that you encouraged them to contribute.

This way you ensure that you don’t miss out on great ideas from meeting participants who are less inclined to speak up than others. Some participants may keep great ideas to themselves if you don’t personally give them a safe environment to speak.

When your team members speak up in a meeting, amplify their contribution especially those who are quieter than the rest.

 

5. Ask Questions that Encourage Open Discussions

In order to have your team participating in meetings, it would help to ask them questions that would have them share more. Have you been in a meeting where nobody talks or shares anything except for the meeting leader? Very boring right? You do not want to be that leader.

Some interesting questions that could inspire conversations are;

• What was your biggest accomplishment? In a weekly meeting, you would want to hear about more frequent, possibly smaller, achievements. However, in a yearly meeting, the feedback would be larger and more influential. Either way, this question gives everyone a chance to participate and be seen in a positive light.

• What resources do you need from me? Letting your team members know you want to help them be successful is a great way to help them feel empowered. Their feedback gives you sight of what may be lacking or needs improvement in the workplace. The important thing is to listen.

• What’s on your hot list from now until our next meeting? Understanding what each team member considers “hot” is a good way to know how they’re managing their jobs and if they need any assistance from you. In case someone mentions the same thing in their hot list as from the previous meetings, you probably need to step in and see what you can do to help them mark it off their list.

 

6. Add Notes and Summarize Items as You Go

Because we are all human, we cannot simply remember every piece of information shared in a meeting. Therefore, the best way to keep track of everything discussed during the meeting is by taking notes.

Meeting notes are important because you will be able to revisit them and review past decisions or conversations and they help maximize the effectiveness of meetings. For the person assigned the role of taking notes, they should know that:

• The notes should be accessible to everyone.
• They should always document decisions and why those decisions were made.
• Before adding the decisions to your meeting summary, repeat them out loud to the team to make sure that everyone agrees.

 

7. Assign the next steps:

Certain decisions will be made during the meeting so it’s important to note what the next steps are. The team members need to be assigned with tasks and deadlines. This keeps everyone on your team accountable for the things they have committed to.

Here are some practical tips to be considered for the next steps:

• Have all of your next steps in one place. This makes it easier for people to go back and check on what they’ve committed to and action on those items.
• Keep the lines of communication open: Make next steps visible to everyone on the team. That way, when things get completed, everyone is aware.

POST- MEETING

1. Send the Meeting Notes Recap to Everyone

The captured meeting notes and summarized takeaways need to be sent to everyone who attended the meeting.

With the minutes to the meeting, people can refresh themselves on what decisions were made, what were the action points, who is responsible for what task and any other context they will need to do their job effectively.

Meeting notes need to capture;

• The attendees of the meeting.
• A list of the items that were on the agenda with summaries of each.
• Action items that people committed to.

 

2. Follow Up On Action Items

If no one takes action on the plans made during the meeting, you just wasted your time and that would be regarded as a useless meeting.

So to avoid this, ensure to circle back! Consider setting a reminder two days after the meeting to check on the progress in accomplishing the action points assigned to the team.

 

3. Collect Feedback from Team Members

As a leader, the aim should be to continuously improve the effectiveness of your team meetings. Getting feedback is the best indicator of whether or not the meeting was effective.

Asking for feedback from the meeting participants helps ensure all parts of the meeting are reaching the objectives set for it.

As you receive feedback, you will be in a position to make the necessary iterations needed to improve the meeting. You could ask questions such as;

• What worked and what didn’t?
• What could we do next time that would make it more productive?
• Was [agenda item X] helpful?
• Was there any information we could have shared in another way?

Reaching out to your team is a great way to show them that they are valued, while still optimizing the effectiveness of the meeting processes.

Remember, the best way to get feedback is by asking the participants immediately after the meeting has ended because it will be fresh in their minds.

Meetings are inevitable and are great tools for synergizing a team, conveying important information and brainstorming on business strategies. As you continue to have meetings in your organization, remember to incorporate the lessons from this article to keep them engaging, motivating and effective.

How do you keep your meetings interesting and engaging?