Shrink your meetings
“I had a three-hour meeting today, and it was interesting and effective,” said no one ever. With you and your subordinates overloaded with work, it doesn't make sense to trap everyone in a conference room for lengthy donut-and-chat sessions. A clear meeting plan with targeted desired results is better for everyone — and your company as a whole. Here are three ways to ensure your company's meetings aren't a drain on time and resources.
Eight is your magic number. No more than eight people should be invited to a meeting, unless it's purely informational. “Focus and responsibility are more challenging with too many people — which is how you end up with folks staring down silently at their laptops for an entire meeting,” writes William Treseder at Harvard Business Review. He advocates thinking about your last meeting, and how many people were actually involved in the deliverables from that meeting.
When it comes to meeting times, why be normal? Gone are the days of meetings that begin at 3 p.m. or 3:30 p.m. Starting a meeting at an odd time — say, 10:10 a.m. or 2:27 p.m. — is a strategy suggested by meeting facilitator Tom LaForce at TomLaForce.com. He says it makes people show up on time, for one thing. “They are more likely to notice the starting time and think that the precision must be for an important reason,” he writes. Also, without the standard half-hour blocks, it allows employees to get other tasks done in between meetings, according to LaForce.
Choose an outcome. To be successful, a meeting needs a useful purpose. Before you set the meeting time and date, decide what you want the result of the meeting to be. Do you want to generate ideas, make a decision or communicate something? “For a meeting to meet this outcome or objective, you have to be clear about what it is,” says MindTools.com.
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