What if you were the team that were known for having amazing meeting processes?
It’s amazing how many participants in workshops, as well as clients, share that they get double and even triple booked to meetings. Inviting someone to a meeting when they are already booked in another meeting is not just unprofessional but it’s disrespectful. Interestingly, with RESPECT (or something similar) being a common organisational value, it’s not demonstrated by this simple act.
Now not only is this time pressure present, but often their meetings are ineffective (particularly online ones), with the core elements of clear objectives, processes and actions missing.
I also often hear, “We need to have another meeting cause we didn’t get to an action in the previous one.”
Through Covid and with team members working from home, many extra meetings were implemented. With so many meetings still online and ineffective, organisations need to review, reset and refresh their meeting processes.
Now, some sobering statistics on meetings in 2024 (sourced from Flowtrace)….
- Only 12.6% of meeting invites that are sent out are ‘optional’.
- Employees spend on average 392 hours per year in meetings.
- In the United States, an estimated 11 million meetings are held every day, translating to over 1 billion per year.
- Interestingly, a majority (83.13%) of employees spend up to one-third of their workweek in meetings.
- The average organization spends roughly 15% of its time in meetings.
- 92% of the workers spent time multitasking during virtual meetings.
- 96% of professionals have missed meetings.
- 52% of employees start to lose attention in meetings between 0 and 30 minutes.
So what if you were the team that were known for having amazing meeting processes?
Be the change, get back to basics…
- Include a clear agenda, outcomes, roles and responsibilities in the meeting invite.
- Ensure at the start of the meeting everyone is aligned for the outcomes.
- Find space in someone’s calendar when booking a meeting. If it’s super urgent/important, call/message them to explain and work out a way to meet.
- Constructively challenge attendance if multiple people from the same team are attending. Can one person from that team attend and share notes?
- What information can you circulate before the meeting to create a more valuable discussion in the meeting?
- Whose strengths can you leverage to make the meeting more effective?
- Don’t set the length of the meetings for 30 mins/60mins etc. Make them 25mins/50mins, giving people a break between meetings and you will still cover all you have to.
- Ensure actions, next steps, communication is clear (and owned) at the end of the meeting.
As Simon Sinek says, “Teams build before the meeting starts.”
Allow time in the meeting for participants to connect before you jump right in to the agenda. This is even more important with online meetings.
As we approach the end of the year (wow it’s gone quick!), it’s a perfect time to reset your meeting processes, taking time to identify what’s working and what could be better.