Meeting Makeover: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Team’s Time
We were desperate to create connection during the pandemic. So desperate that we started scheduling more meetings and inviting more people to them. In fact, the new work-from-home norms resulted in some significant jumps:
People attended 13% more meetings.
The number of people invited to each meeting rose by 14%.
Once a meeting is established, we struggle to cancel it or disinvite attendees because we’re afraid of hurting feelings, which means your current meeting norms are likely wasting time and money.
It’s time for a hard reset. Leverage these five strategies for an effective meeting makeover.
1 // Make 25 the new 30, and 50 the new 60.
Most of us are scrambling to jump from one meeting to the next. Don’t even think about refilling your water bottle or going to the bathroom. And with back-to-back schedules, we see meetings consistently starting a few minutes late as the host waits for everyone to join.
Want a quick fix?
Change every 30-minute meeting to 25 minutes, and every one-hour meeting to 50 minutes. This could be the easiest, most effective meeting makeover strategy of them all.
2 // Ban meetings on one or two days.
A client of mine instituted “No Meeting Wednesdays.” Now Wednesdays are everyone’s favorite and most productive days.
Our brains need time to get in focused flow on most tasks, but constant meeting interruptions get in the way.
Sometimes it’s the constraints we put in place that enable us to produce our best work. Perhaps your team could benefit from some guardrails.
3 // Stand up.
If you want meetings with:
concise comments, rather than unnecessary monologues, and
focused participants who are not multi-tasking
Then try hosting a stand-up. It’s just how it sounds: all attendees are literally standing up. Nobody wants to stand forever, so they keep their comments brief, and it’s hard to secretly multi-task when standing, so you have everyone’s full attention. Problems solved!
4 // Calculate the cost of each meeting.
Inefficient meetings not only waste time, they also waste money. But how much?
You can get a decent estimate by calculating the average of the salaries of those in attendance. No need to dive into specific salaries; instead, we’re aiming for an average based on the different levels in the room (i.e., executive versus level 1 analyst, etc.). Reference your organization’s salary range tables or ask HR for help.
Once you have an estimate, consider these two questions:
Who does not need to attend this meeting? Whose time are we wasting?
Could this meeting be shorter or less frequent?
Share the potential cost savings with the group when making adjustments so all can understand and appreciate the impact.
5 // Start with a clean slate.
Ready to go “full send”? I recently heard of some interesting experiments: a few organizations—such Asana and Dropbox—helped their employees start with a clean calendar slate. Overnight, IT deleted all recurring meetings from calendars, and employees were required to wait at least 48 hours before scheduling any new recurring meetings.
This practice forced employees to evaluate the necessity of every meeting. It also helped eliminate worries of hurting feelings by cancelling or disinviting attendees.
Perhaps it’s time for your team to start with a clean slate.
If you’ve followed my work for a while, then you know that I am a firm believer in the value of effective meetings. Well-designed and well-managed meetings can work magic, but poorly managed meetings can drain the life (as well as time and money) from a team.
It’s time for a healthy meeting makeover.