Due to the pandemic and increased home office, the number of online meetings increased dramatically. This also increased the amount of useless and time-wasting meetings. Such painful meetings also existed before and are the cause why many technical experts in bigger companies feel that meetings, in general, are a big waste of time.
In my opinion, meetings are important to get alignment and decisions on complex matters. However if not prepared properly and set up for unnecessary topics they fall in the above category and make you a time thief.
The good news is that there are a couple of things you can do to make your meetings high quality and high value. Level up your skills and read on.
To meet or not to meet?
Before you consider setting up a meeting think carefully if this is really required. In general, it depends on the topic of discussion, its sensitivity, and its complexity. Should you be able to easily explain it via an email or messenger chat then use those mediums to have a discussion and get to the required outcome. This allows people to reply in their own time and frees up time.
My rule of thumb here is that if it takes me less than 5 minutes to write an email to clearly explain the situation and my ask then no meeting is required.
Depending on your work and scenarios you need to identify the best option for you.
Preparation
Make it a rule that your meetings are always prepared! This goes a long way in making meetings efficient and effective. If a meeting is not prepared the discussions are usually unfocused and the targeted outcome is not clear, leading to further required follow-ups and more wasted time. There is nothing worse than sitting in such a meeting, especially if you have a huge amount of important work to get back to.
Therefore, to save me and my team members time we introduced a rule that everyone is allowed to decline any meeting that is sent without proper preparation and does not include an agenda or information about what the meeting is about in the invite. This also educates teams and people outside of your team to take care of preparation. However, when you decline meetings still stay friendly and give a clear reason. I usually use a template such as below to decline such invites:
“Dear sender, due to the high workload, we introduced a few rules and systems to make our workdays more output-oriented. One of the rules is not to attend meetings that do not contain a clear agenda and do not allow us to prepare to get the best possible result.
As your invite did not contain information about the purpose, intent, or agenda I had to decline the meeting to be able to focus on other critical tasks.
In case you have an important ask please send out an invite with sufficient information to make the collaboration effective.
Thanks for your understanding,
Jonathan”
Let’s discuss the 4 key items to prepare for a good meeting:
- Agenda
- Think about what the meeting is about, how the flow of discussion should be, and what the outcome should be. Write this down in a bullet-point list and create your agenda out of it.
- Example:
- Introduction
- Problem explanation – “Customers require bigger virtual machines for their workload”
- Discussion on options
- Decision & Action items
- Pre-read
- The agenda is only part of the invite. Explain the key points in written form or prepare a slide deck that contains what will be discussed. For C-Level meetings, it is quite common that a pre-read is mandatory and has to be sent out 24 hours in advance. No one likes surprises and if you provide a pre-read the invitees can prepare properly.
- List of invitees
- Keep the invitees to the absolute minimum! Who really needs to discuss the issue and get to a decision? The more people in a call, the more discussions, and the less likely it is that you have a good meeting.
- Date & Time
- You want something from others. Before you blindly send out invites, check the availability of the invitees! To have people join your call you need to make it easy for them. Check their calendars, especially when using outlook this should be absolutely common sense.
During the meeting
In a meeting that is happening in person, you have a big advantage that you can see your colleagues and the other way around. They can read your facial expressions and body language and you can do the same. This helps with understanding the audience and moods during the discussions. I would also argue that it is easier to keep the attention of the people in the room as no one can hide behind the screen and do emails in parallel (except if they brought their laptops..).
Making sure you have the attention and also making sure people can understand your intention in online meetings is a bit more difficult. Based on my experience the following actions help to keep your audience engaged and have a good meeting with active participation.
- Turn on your camera. This makes it easier for people to follow and read your body language. I also found that collaboration is easier if you can assign a face to the voice. Another benefit is that people who have the camera on typically keep their attention on the meeting. A disadvantage here is that if you have tons of online meetings having it always on can be exhausting. You can ask others to turn it on, but respect if someone does not want to do it.
- Share your screen, the presentation, or if nothing else just share the minutes you are writing. Use tools like online whiteboards (Build in Teams function, paint, or similar tools) to discuss or explain more complicated manners in an interactive way. This is extremely important as the visual aspect is helping most colleagues to understand what the meeting and discussion are about. I found people are way more active if they can follow the meeting with a visual aid.
- When you speak be precise and to the point. Don’t tell long stories and be mindful of the time.
- Speak like you are excited about it. Don’t present or discuss in a monotonous voice. Even if you are highly motivated listening to a monotonous voice is extremely difficult. This will be true for your audience as well so watch out for it.
- As host, you are responsible to moderate and steering the meeting and discussions in the right direction. Let people speak and provide their input, after all, you set up a meeting to get everyone together. That being said don’t allow people to fall into tangents and go on and on about their pet peeves and bring them back to the core point of the discussion or meeting.
After the meeting
Congratulations, you had a good meeting! But wait! You are not yet done.
If you do not document and share the minutes the meeting basically did not happen. There is no proof of any interaction, no documented decisions or action items. So send out the minutes to all participants.
You can learn here how to write good minutes or why it is important to do so.
Follow up regularly on open action items and their status and set up follow-up meetings if required.
Do you have good ideas on how to conduct effective meetings? Let me know about it!