Meetings that lack efficiency frequently occur because:
If you have a 1-hour meeting with 5 people in attendance, you're not just wasting 1 hour if it's not productive, your wasting 5 man hours. One hour for each attendee. That's a lot of man hours!
With this in mind, here are some rules on how to facilitate a great meeting and how to make sure they are productive and achieve an outcome.
Meetings are awesome to brainstorm ideas and get in-sync. For some topics they are way more effective than typing on a group chat. There are a few benefits that meetings have, which make them useful to have (for the appropriate topics/reasons).
Bloating a meeting with unnecessary numbers is the #1 way that a meeting can be doomed... before it starts. Any meeting with more than 10 people is destined to have people attend but who do not participate or contribute. Aim to keep it to 6 or fewer.
Teams Meeting chats are only visible to people who were invited to the meeting. If someone joins late or isn’t invited, they won’t see the previous conversation.
If others need to be part of the discussion or you want to continue the conversation after the meeting ends, create a group chat instead.
Meetings don't have to be a drag. When they're done right, they actually help teams move faster and stay on the same page. Let's break down how to keep meetings focused, useful, and worth showing up for.
Scheduling meetings can often feel like a necessary chore, especially when they lack a clear purpose or agenda. Calls or video meetings, without any clear agenda or purpose, are where your joy and energy go to die.
Here’s how to ensure your meetings are effective and worthwhile. Before a meeting, to give it the best chance of success, you should make sure you have done the following:
Waiting for participants to join a meeting can be awkward and make people feel disengaged. It's crucial for the meeting leader to maintain a positive and energetic atmosphere during this time to set the tone for the rest of the meeting.
Anchoring is a cognitive bias where an initial piece of information (the "anchor") heavily influences subsequent judgments and decisions. This bias can infiltrate various aspects of our lives, including workplace interactions and negotiations. Recognizing how anchoring works is crucial to making informed and unbiased decisions. Custom software is difficult to estimate and using an anchor too early or without the necessary rigour can create issues.
Clients often have an implicit budget or value anchor in their minds when discussing projects. This anchor can be based on a budget set by their business or a perceived value. If you don't uncover this anchor early, it can lead to misaligned expectations and project dissatisfaction.
Any good meeting has a clear goal, and an agenda that breaks that goal up into items that are “For information,” “For discussion,” or “For decision”.
The primary objective of most meetings should be to establish clear next steps. These steps should be broken down into action items and assigned to the responsible individuals, with all other attendees CC’d.
It's recommended to designate a scribe who drafts action points during the meeting and assigns them directly to those responsible for completing the tasks. The scribe should also document any decision-making process by writing down each person's arguments. After writing down everyone’s comments on the options, the notes can be reviewed as a group to better inform what the best course of action might be. If the scribe hasn't been designated at the start, simply ask: "Who will be the scribe?"
Common action items may include: