Stop Allowing Ineffective Meetings to Waste Your Team's Time

Your team will never reach their full potential if they keep treating their calendars like a dumping ground.

Photo by Ariungoo Batzorig on Unsplash

Bleary-eyed and hoarse from 6 straight hours of meetings — through lunch, and late into the day, Carol finally got up to get a glass of water.

It was Thursday, and once again, she was facing the end of a week of nonstop meetings with little time to think, plan, or even assess how the organization was going.

One of Carol’s strengths was her ability to think on her feet and to stay focused on goals, but with an average of 30+ meetings a week, she was starting to lose the capacity to be strategic.

Among the meetings Carol attended, at least half didn’t have a clear agenda, and others were poorly run. Few resulted in clear decisions and next steps. Worst of all, critical issues weren’t being addressed. It was starting to feel like her calendar was a dumping ground for bad meetings.

Sure, she could blame the meeting organizers or her leadership team, but as the CEO, she knew that if she didn’t drive rigor in how they operated, no one else would.

Ignoring your meeting culture hurts you and your team’s effectiveness.

Poor meeting hygiene is nothing new. I’ve heard it lamented in every leadership team I’ve been a part of — 9 and counting. Yet while leaders are quick to complain, they struggle to address the problem.

Nearly 8 years ago, Harvard Business Review reported: “We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries:

• 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work.

• 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.

• 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.

• 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.”

Almost a decade later, according to Discovery ABA, meeting volume is estimated to have increased by 8-10% every year. Employees spend at least 3 hours per week on meetings, and VPs, director and c-level roles have 17 meetings per week.

For smaller organizations like Carol’s, meeting volume can be even higher especially if collaboration is expected to be ad hoc and informal. For all the benefits of being able to easily have a conversation, there are real costs to an unintentional meeting culture.

A team that is unable to focus or complete their most critical work because of too many meetings is one that will never be effective.

The amount of money wasted by poor meeting discipline is criminal.

When you allow meetings in your organization to be ineffective, it is tantamount to saying you just don’t care about your time or your team’s time.

A great way to make this waste feel more visceral is to actually calculate the cost of a wasted meeting:

$ Cost of a Wasted Meeting = Number of People x Meeting time x Salary / Hour

If you have even one executive in the room, the cost easily shoots up into the thousands. If you tally up all of the meetings in a week that are suboptimal or should simply be canceled, you might be surprised by how much money you are wasting every week.

Most organizations are meticulously careful about overspending. Why would you not apply the same rigor to your meetings?

You can’t improve something if you don’t know what better looks like.

Carol called an emergency meeting Friday morning to talk with her leadership team and raise her concerns. It turned out everyone was feeling drained and ineffective and that while meetings might not have been the only culprit, it was the most obvious one.

They committed to pausing for 4 business days to figure out how to restructure their meeting culture and execution:

• 1 day to assess the issues and set their vision

• 1 day to set up new expectations and rhythms

• 1 day to roll out their plan and get feedback from their teams

• 1 day to make final adjustments

For Carol and her leadership team, clarifying what they wanted wasn’t all that difficult. In their brainstorming session, there were a few debates about the nuances of an effective meeting and making sure there were enough types of meetings to account for differing needs, but it only took about 60 min to build their Better Meetings Vision:

• All staff should have room for at least 4 blocks of 2 hours of uninterrupted time to focus each week

• All meetings must have a clear goal and an owner/facilitator

• Agendas and preparation should be sent at least 1 business day in advance

• Meetings should be used primarily for decision-making, input gathering, connection building

• Meetings should be used minimally for status updates

• When in doubt, cancel the meeting, send a memo, or record a video instead

Once they had these goals set, they shifted into developing how they bring them into their day-to-day.

Realize your vision incrementally to build trust and test and learn.

Carole and her team knew that in order to make the changes they wanted, it would require a number of changes. Smartly, they didn’t try to tackle them all at once. They started with 1 or 2 and added more over time.

Making progress incrementally was much easier than changing everything all at once. They understood that their team was a living and breathing organism, more likely to reject a full transplant of beliefs and processes than smaller changes over time.

They wove in pieces, made mistakes, showed success, and then added more. This enabled them to build trust, prove their commitment, and sustain the changes.

8 Ways to Level Up Your Meetings

Here are some of the ways that Carol and her team leveled up their team’s meeting quality and freed up time on everyone’s calendars for more deep work.

1. Clarify the Purpose: Why are we here?

Too often, we let meetings get added to our calendar that don’t have a clear agenda. Set up a requirement that every meeting must include a goal, topic, and/or agenda.

There are different types of meetings to consider:

• Decision-making: One or more decisions need to made. Outline the decisions needed before the meeting and set times for when these decisions need to be made by. Importantly, make sure you already have all of the other information needed and reviewed by the decision maker(s) ahead of the meeting and make sure the decision maker(s) agree that they will make a decision in the meeting ahead of time.

• Input gathering discussion: Brainstorming or discussing a complex topic can help accelerate input gathering, but it should not replace surveys and other asynchronous, highly efficient methods.

• Connection building: In a world of hybrid and remote workforces, there are times when a live conversation is important to build relationships. Make sure you are facilitating a meeting that achieves this goal and don’t get it confused with another.

2. Establish Roles & Authority: Who set this up? Why are you here?

Do you ever go into a room and everyone just sits there waiting for someone to take control? Don’t ever let a meeting get scheduled without everyone understanding who owns the meeting and what each attendee’s role is.

Here are the most critical roles to have in every meeting (they can be the same person, but it needs to be clear who it is)

• Meeting owner: Responsible for the agenda

• Facilitator: Runs the meeting, keeps people on topic, and ensures productive talk time between participants (e.g. no hogging the air space)

• Decision maker: Will make the call on any open questions or decisions that come up in the meeting

• Notetaker: Tracks decisions made, open items, and next steps

• Timer: Keeps the meeting running on schedule

• Contributor: This should be anyone in the meeting. If they don’t have something to contribute, they shouldn’t be there.

Meetings should aim to have the least number of people to get the job done. This increases efficiency and creates more space for any needed dialogue. Any one who doesn’t have a role shouldn’t be invited. This isn’t because they aren’t valuable to the organization. This is because they are valuable and their time shouldn’t be wasted.

3. Prepare or Cancel: Not being ready is the same as not showing up

In organizations with a more casual culture, it can be challenging to create more structure by requiring pre-meeting materials. But the cost of not being prepared for a meeting is too high to be ignored.

Proper meeting preparation takes only 3 steps:

1. Know the purpose of the meeting

2. Know the role you are assigned

3. Review any relevant information that the meeting owner has assigned before the meeting

The third step might seem like the most difficult because it may require gathering and consolidating information, but really the first two are the more challenging to sort through. 1 and 2 are the most strategic elements to clarify and make sure your meeting attendees are in the know. Allocate the appropriate time to get this right.

When you do prepare the information for participants to read, keep in mind the following:

• Less is more: Don’t overwhelm your audience. Only provide what is most relevant.

• Summarize the key points: An executive summary will make sure that everyone can easily reference what’s most important.

• Don’t bury the punchline: If you have a recommendation or the meeting is to make a decision, make that clear up front. Put the purpose and agenda at the top so that everyone knows what you’re aiming for.

• Give everyone enough time: Ideally send the preparation materials at least 1 business day in advance, but for more dense topics, consider sending up to a week ahead of the meeting. Just make sure you send a reminder the day before so that they don’t lose the thread. Pro Tip: Include the preparation information in the meeting invite.

4. Follow-Up + Follow-Through: Outcomes matter more than outputs

Just as preparation for a meeting is essential, so are the next steps coming out of the meeting. In some ways, these pre- and post-actions are even more important than the meeting itself. If follow-up doesn’t happen in a timely fashion, it’s almost as if the meeting didn’t happen at all.

Make sure meeting owners (or facilitators and notetakers) summarize the key takeaways and next actions from the meeting. This includes task owners, due dates, and deliverables. This may feel rudimentary, like project management 101, but there’s a reason why project management is essential to good operations, it ensures follow-through.

Carol and her team set the following guidelines:

• Meeting takeaways and next action notes are sent out within 1 business day of the meeting

• Owners of next actions need to report back on the status of their items within 1 business week from the meeting (if not sooner) in a thread so that all of the items are easy to track

• Anyone or any action that is delayed or changed needs to share their update immediately, the reason for the delay or change and their resolution path

By focusing on the steps coming out of a meeting, you ensure that your team is prioritizing driving outcomes vs. outputs. The output of a meeting may be essential to the outcome, but the outcome is what really matters in the end.

5. Regularly Assess & Adjust: Don’t set and forget

Humans love routine and stability. But the reality of business is that nearly nothing is stable anymore. Running your meeting structures in a steady state means that you’ll likely be out of sync with what your business needs within 6-9 months, if not sooner.

The best way to assess your meetings is to regularly talk with your team about how they perceive the value of their time in meetings.

Ask these questions to help you get honest and thoughtful insights:

• How would you rate the effectiveness of each of your recurring meetings each week (1-10, 1 = highly ineffective, 10 = highly effective)

• What are the main issues with low-performing meetings?

  • Ask this open-ended and then ask with some examples (e.g. lack of ownership, poor preparation, unclear agenda, poor follow-through, not tackling the most critical topics, etc)

• What are the top 2-3 things we can do to make meetings better?

Consider restructuring or canceling any meetings rated low in effectiveness by two or more people, especially if they have provided substantive ideas on how to improve them. Two people might seem like a low threshold, but because most people are likely to be conflict-avoidant or prefer the status quo, the low bar helps you stay committed to making change. If two people indicate that a meeting is not up to par, then that’s usually a good indicator to take action.

6. When in Doubt, Delete: Mystery = Waste

For any meetings that feel unclear in purpose, structure, or ownership, cancel them. It’s ok to err on the side of fewer meetings versus more. It’ll help reinforce your focus on quality.

Be particularly skeptical of meetings that use a majority of the time for status updates or round robins. Stand-ups are popular in agile product and technology cultures and might be the exception, but only if they keep to the principles that ensure extremely efficient and on-topic communication from each member of the team. Most updates are best shared asynchronously (see the next section).

Another type of meeting that deserves extra scrutiny is a large group format with a long agenda and mostly one person speaking at a time. All Staff meetings may be an acceptable exception, but you should check for effectiveness by gathering feedback from your team before you assume that they are being executed well.

Your team will benefit from your rigor in assessing meetings.

Even if there is some consternation when a meeting that could have accelerated a body of work is canceled, the net benefit will be worth it. The owner will remember to be more clear and prepared going forward.

Frustration that helps your team level up and develop better habits is productive and worth the emotional tumult.

7. Use Alternatives: Optimize how you engage

Instead of always defaulting to meetings, incorporate other methods to engage your team. Here are a few and when to use them:

• Memos: A document that contains all of the information that you want to share. It can take a bit of effort to create, but it forces you to clarify your thinking and consolidate all of your thoughts in one place for your stakeholders. Paired with a meeting, this works as an excellent preparation tool and system of record for future reference.

• Video memos: Similar to a written memo (above), but with video you can convey more of your voice and energy. You can also couple video with a written memo or a presentation recording. Just be cognizant of how long the video is. Shorter is generally more likely to be consumed.

• Polls & Surveys: If you’re looking for inputs, don’t be afraid to use a poll or a survey to gather insights. Sometimes a conversation is best, but if you want to get a quick pulse, get structured results, and reach a larger number of people quickly, these are a great option.

• Email: Many organizations still overuse and abuse email communications, but sometimes it’s the best way to disseminate information quickly, directly, and organize information for future reference. Just don’t use it to solicit feedback or gather inputs. A long back and forth in email with a large number of recipients is the surest way to confuse and lose people.

• Asynchronous Chat: For brief updates or to enable dialogue about a topic when it isn’t urgent to resolve. You can set parameters for how folks should engage in the chat and when the conversation will be considered closed. Just as you would for a meeting, clarity the purpose, roles, and when it is complete, sum up the next actions.

• Trackers: For projects or initiatives that have an existing plan and/or KPIs, consider using a tracker that can be updated weekly or monthly to capture progress and share updates. This help keep a record of progress and can help you scale updates to a wide-ranging group of people.

Test different methods and encourage your team to share what’s working and what isn’t. Over time, you can refine what are the preferred formats for different situations for your organization.

8. Reward & Recognize: Good meetings are a skill

Using a carrot to reward those on your team who lead the way toward more productive and efficient meetings is an excellent way to help set the standard going forward.

Consider incorporating meeting habits in your review process. Create a process for employee nominations of the people who are the most effective meeting owners and attendees. Get creative about how you reward and recognize.

What gets measured, gets done. Don’t let your team wonder about who is getting it right. Highlight the people who are modeling the right behaviors and you’ll accelerate adoption and change.

Key Takeaways

Here is a quick recap of the 8 ways you can immediately elevate the quality of your organization’s meetings and increase the effectiveness of your entire team:

1. Clarify the Purpose: Why are we here?

2. Establish Roles & Authority: Who set this up? Why are you here?

3. Prepare or Cancel: Not being ready is the same as not showing up

4. Follow-Up + Follow-Through: Outcomes matter more than outputs

5. Regularly Assess & Adjust: Don’t set and forget

6. When in Doubt, Delete: Mystery = Waste

7. Use Alternatives: Optimize how you engage

8. Reward & Recognize: Good meetings are a skill

As a leader of your organization, you don’t have to be the CEO to take up the mantle to improve your organization. You can start with your department or work with other leaders to test across multiple functions.

The most critical step is to not let mediocrity steal away your time or your team’s time.

What’s been the most valuable way you’ve improved your meeting culture and hygiene? Share your thoughts in the Comments.

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