Think of all the bad team meetings you have attended: Meetings where one person dominated the conversation, the room argued in circles, or the content shared was repetitive – and could have easily been an email.

Running an effective team meeting shouldn’t be rocket science. However, most managers are still running team meetings that are poorly organized, overly long, and lack clear takeaways.

Here is what Dr. Rogelberg (PhD in Organizational Science & Management) discovered about meetings:

• North American workers attend approximately 15 meetings per week.

• “Too many meetings” – is the number 1 reason for daily fatigue and feeling of workload.

• Overall job satisfaction for the employees is highly positively correlated with meeting satisfaction

• The top 3 factors impacting engagement in meetings are: 

  • Timeliness (is the meeting starting and ending on time?)

  • Relevancy (is this meeting really important for me?) and 

  • Freedom of speech (do the participants get enough opportunity to freely express their thoughts and ideas?)

Now, if we are to boil all of this research down, we can see two (2) main points coming to light – 

1. We are truly living and dying in meetings. With Covid there are just too many meetings indeed. 

But at the same time:

2. Meetings matter! They really do. The quality of meetings impacts not just the business but our job satisfaction and engagement!

In this blog, we will discuss 12 strategies that can truly transform your meeting experience. Most of these apply to all types of meetings. The 5 most common types of meetings that people participate in are - 

• Problem Solving and Brainstorming

• Planning Meetings

• Meetings to receive or provide Feedback 

• Pitches 

• Meetings to share insights and findings from a campaign.

Most of these 12 strategies fit into one or more of the meeting types above. Before we dive into the 12 strategies, here is a framework we will use to layout the strategies: There are 3 stages that take place in a meeting:

• Pre-meeting Planning

• Meeting Execution

• Post-meeting Actions

We will learn strategies for each stage, which when combined together will create AN AWESOME MEETING EXPERIENCE for you.

Strategy # 1: Develop a Steward Mindset

Who is a Steward? - A steward is a person who looks after passengers on a plane or train. They care about the experience of the passengers. You, as an individual need to adopt this mindset, where you truly want to care about the experience of the participants in a meeting.

Walking into a meeting with this mindset impacts the choices you make: 

• What you put on the agenda

• Who you invite

• How you design the meeting experience

This mindset lays the foundation for the remaining 11 strategies. If the steward mindset is absent, then everything else falls like a pack of cards.

Strategy # 2 - Measure the quality of a meeting

Are you measuring the quality of your meetings? How well did the meeting go? What went well, what didn’t go so well? 

As per Peter Drucker, who is popularly known as the ‘Founder of Modern Management’, he said “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” - and of course you can’t improve it.

Now you might be thinking – “Great, I already have so much work to do, and now I have to create a post-meeting survey too?”. Well don’t worry, you don’t have to create long fancy surveys for each meeting. I would suggest that after each meeting use polls in Google Meet to ask just 2 questions.

1. How did the meeting go and

2. One thing to improve about the meeting

You will get instant feedback and that is how you can also measure the quality of your meetings.

Strategy # 3 – Go for the shortest duration possible.

On a usual basis, we book our meetings for 30 or 60 minutes. If you typically set 1 hour for a meeting, try changing it to 50 minutes. In the typical 30 minute meetings, change those to 25 minutes. Why though? It’s because of the Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law states - Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Let me explain - The more time you assign to a task, the effort required decreases over time and there is more time wasted. The lesser the time you assign to a task, the more effort required and less time is wasted. 

Still confused? Maybe Elon Musk can help. He says: “If you give yourself 30 days to clean your home, it will take you 30 days. But if you give yourself 3 hours, it will take 3 hours.” And the same applies to your goals, ambitions and plans, and naturally your meetings as well.

I promise you that the overall effectiveness won’t diminish. You will just accomplish the same amount in less time, thus becoming more productive and you will be giving 5 - 10 minutes back to the meeting participant, who doesn’t love that?

Strategy # 4 – Go for the smallest number of people as possible.

If you are like most professionals, then you’d typically invite as many people as possible. Why? Perhaps because you’re thinking: Maybe I need Sandra to listen in as an FYI or maybe if I invite my manager who may not need to be there, I will increase my visibility in the organization.

Whatever the reason, the reality is – As the number of participants in a meeting increases, the meeting becomes more dysfunctional. Moreover, social loafing increases - meaning the more people there are in the meeting, the more people then start to “hide” in meetings and that impacts engagement. 

So, go for the smallest number of people possible. And if you are one of those people who are worried about “hurting people's feelings” by leaving them out, then consider dividing participants into 2 groups:  

• Core members: who’s input you need the most. They are the meeting drivers and are critical to the meeting.  

• Secondary members: mark these people as optional. Perhaps they need to be there just as an FYI, to be in the loop. Again, if you are worried about any sort of political backlash for not inviting this person, then be respectful: and get their input before the meeting OR you can just invite them partially for a portion of the meeting where their expertise is required. 

And trust me, most of the time, people will be thankful for not being invited to a meeting then be hurt about being left out. So you’d be doing them a favour really!

Strategy # 5 – Don’t just create an Agenda, create an IMPACTFUL Agenda.

Research shows that just creating an agenda is not that effective. So here is a simple trick – Frame Agenda items not as a laundry list but rather as questions to be answered.

E.g. You are having a meeting to talk about improving a customer-related process and here is what you write down in the agenda: 

• Intro

• Discuss the current state of the customer process

• Conclusions

Now, what if we flip the laundry list item to a question? 

• Intro

• How might we improve our response time to customers by 20%?

• Conclusion

Questions inspire problem-solving, ideation, and spark excitement. Questions speak directly to our natural curiosity and drive engagement. This tip is highly encouraged.

Strategy # 6 – Schedule your meetings in the morning.

This one is pretty simple. In the morning your brain is at its peak, and it is not fatigued. After 3pm, your brain experiences “decision-fatigue”. Schedule your most important meetings for the AM to make sure your tired brain isn’t making bad decisions post lunch. 

Strategy # 7 – Assign roles to Attendees.

Unfortunately, most of us simply run our meetings on auto-pilot mode. If you can assign the following four (4) roles to different people in the meeting, your meetings will go a lot more efficiently and people won’t participate in social loafing because they have a job to do.

• Meeting Chair: Is the person leading the meeting. I call it the CEO of the Meeting. 

• Time keeper: I call this person the CPO - Chief Productivity Officer because this person is responsible for keeping the meeting on track

• Note taker: I call this person the CCO - Chief Clarity Officer because their notes bring clarity towards the discussions in the meeting. These notes also serve as evidence and create alignment. 

• Meeting Quality Monitor or MQM: The person who is responsible for measuring the quality of the meeting: Did it go well? Did it not? Again, this doesn’t need to be super elaborative as mentioned earlier. A simple 2 question poll at the end of the meeting is a great starting point.

Strategy # 8 - Timeliness, Hosting, Prioritization & Standup

• Timeliness - Start and end the meeting on time. No rocket science there. This is part of us being professionals and respectful of other people’s time

• Be a great host - Start your meeting with energy. Your energy as the host impacts the energy of the attendees. And don’t forget to thank them for their time

• Prioritize your agenda - You don’t want to be walking out of the meeting feeling “damn! We didn’t get to the most important question. Now I need to book another meeting for that!” - So address the most burning question first. 

• If possible, stand up for the meeting. Why? Because research shows that even though both, stand up and sit down, meetings are equally effective but stand up meetings take half as much time. So, stand-up meetings are more efficient.

Strategy # 9 - Allocate time during meetings for participants to read and prepare for a discussion.

Here is a common problem we all face as meeting chairs: Our meeting participants come to meetings unprepared. So what’s the solution? 

The solution to the problem comes straight out of the Jeff Bezos Business School: Amazon has a very weird but effective meeting culture, where the meeting chair provides a short 1-page document to the attendees that documents the burning questions. And the first 5 minutes of the meeting are spent in silence, where everybody reads that 1-page document. 

This means you are giving the attendees preparation time during the meeting itself. And the results as per research are phenomenal.

Strategy # 10 – Silent Meetings (Silent Brainstorming)

How do we brainstorm or ideate?

Do all participants get a chance to contribute and participate? What if there is a Blabbering Bob or a Shy Sasha in the meeting? In such cases, Blabbering Bob takes over the room and a Shy Sasha’s great idea stays buried in her head. So is there a better way?

The better way is called Silent Meetings or Silent Brainstorming. A study conducted at Harvard showed that for problem-solving and brainstorming meetings, this method works a lot better than the usual method.

The brainstorming starts not with the loudest person in the room shouting an idea…but with attendees thinking, drawing and writing down ideas on a piece of paper. Silent thinking allows the brain to focus on the problem, not on what Jeff or Julian are saying and thinking. 

Once the silent thinking is done, then the team can collaboratively discuss ideas one by one - allowing Shy Shasha an equal opportunity to speak and share her ideas.

Strategy # 11 is – Reserve 5 minutes for Summary and Feedback

Towards the end of the meeting, some teamwork is necessary to make the meeting more effective. 

1. Timekeeper: Provides a 5 mins heads up to let the attendees know to wrap up the discussion 10-mins before the end time

2. In the last 5 mins, the note-taker takes charge and summarizes the decisions made and any action items 

3. Lastly, the Meeting Quality Monitor asks for feedback on the meeting (this usually takes less than 30 seconds) using the polling feature on Zoom, Teams and Google Meet 

Strategy # 12 – Distribute Notes with Decisions and Action Items.

Research has shown that distributing notes with clear decisions and action items improves the effectiveness of meetings by 50%! That’s huge. Why? Because these notes improve transparency, accountability and create alignment amongst stakeholders. 

Share which strategy resonates the most with you and the one you will be using in your next meeting? For more information connect with me at omer@omerqadri.com