How To Run Effective Meetings

We are in a very fortunate position when it comes to the fact that we get to compare and contrast how different businesses conduct their operations. We’ve also been able to sit on a fair share of meetings – Which we often ask if we can experience it first hand, as if we were a fly on the wall observing – just as an experiment in how different organisations have effective meetings. This has provided us with the tools to determine what makes a great meeting and what can constitute a bad meeting. Too often, however, we’ve seen people get together in a room, and by virtue of the simple fact that they’re assembled in a room together, they feel as though they’re having a good meeting although all it had been is a big waste of time.

Because of the current work environment in which a large chunk of the workforce is working remotely, your organisations needs to know how to run effective virtual and in-person meetings. Fortunately, the COVID-19 has lead to a rapid increase in meetings run through through the means of video conferencing with those engaging in remote work able to tune into meetings from all over the world. It could be a good idea for your organisation to have a brainstorming session around some strategies you might implement to ensure every team is able to run their meetings virtually.

How to have effective meetings is a valuable skill for every organisation to learn as team meetings are very important to the day-to-day maintenance of any business. Everyone in the organisation needs to realise that time is precious, particularly when the organisation’s time and resources are all being allocated to a one-to-two hour meeting; a time when some departments grind to a halt while the manager is occupied. We’ve come to realise, through both experience and reading the psychology behind how our brains work in the context of doing business that the difference between an effective meeting and a waste of everyone’s time boils down to a few simple steps.

USE APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY IN YOUR MEETINGS

Appreciative Inquiry is one of the most simple yet effective ways to kick-start a positive psychological loop in your organisation and ensures the product or service you’re delivering only gets better as you double down on your strengths. It’s a collaborative process and requires you to get feedback and input from everyone in your organisation, which makes it a great place to start in terms of having effective meetings. Ask around in your organisation to list what you’re currently doing well, and ensure the necessary steps are put in place to make sure this doesn’t suffer. Promises made to your clients are the most important promises to deliver upon, so when you’re in a meeting, make sure everyone has listed what they believe to be the most important promises you’re making to the market. This will in part form what is to become your mission statement, and gives you an idea of certain parts of the organisation that simply cannot go backward.

EMPOWER YOUR STAFF

As a leader, try to refrain from talking in a meeting to use it as a time to sit back and listen to your staff; they’re your ears and eyes on the ground, after all. Only the most stubborn leaders will use their meetings as a soapbox. Let your meetings be a time of empowerment and give everyone in the room an opportunity – equal, if possible – to speak. Great decisions for the organisation are based on first-hand experience from everyone in the organisation, as well as drawing on the experience from your management team; it’s not a matter of just one or the other. The by-product of empowering your staff in meetings is that they’re likely to be more productive for the rest of the week, and if you assign projects to staff members that would not normally be on the part of the consultation process are now emboldened with a sense of accountability to contribute more.

ENCOURAGE CRITICISM

On a similar note to empowering your staff, encourage healthy debate. Learning how to run a more effective meeting can heavily rely on your teams ability to challenge each other in a healthy manner, discussing what the best way forward is for the company. Organisations that produce extraordinary results are the ones that acknowledge that while it’s good to ensure everyone is happy and feels safe, you need to be objective about things. Sometimes simply acknowledging this at the start of a meeting can help people realise that it’s not necessarily an attack on themselves or their personality if they are going to receive some feedback. When you become part of an organisation, there’s an inherent amount of accountability that you’re also taking on, to produce better results than when you walked in the door. Another way to ensure no one feels attacked is to make sure the criticisms remain solely on their work, or the underwhelming results of a project, rather than reflective of their efforts or their personality. Give them a ‘criticism sandwich’, a critique sandwiched between two compliments.

STICK TO THE AGENDA

This, at times, is easier said than done. It’s common to get derailed and find your team talking about something completely different, making it hard to stick to the allocated meeting time. It’s human nature, so it’s at times inevitable, and it’s also tempting for some personalities to get distracted and relish in the opportunity to talk about something that isn’t necessarily related to your organisation, or the project at hand. To combat the potential time-wasting, have a list of agenda items that you’d like to be addressed for your meeting – this is more applicable to bigger, management review sessions rather than weekly meetings – and also allocate an appropriate amount of time to discuss the problem and possible solutions before moving to the next item. Keep the inverted pyramid structure in mind when you’re drawing up your meeting agenda, positioning the most important issues up top so they are addressed early on in the session, making sure that no important action items are missed. You want to be leveraging everyone’s brainpower on the most important issues. It’s also important that you start on time and ensure the meeting time doesn’t overlap on any of your teams schedules.

HAVE MEETINGS REGULARLY, NOT QUARTERLY.

While a quality management system asks you to have quarterly management review sessions, I suggest you should at the very least have fortnightly, if not weekly department meetings to ensure you’re on track. The problem with having quarterly meetings only is that your organisation is less likely to adapt to market changes, as they’ll often spring upon you without warning, leaving you little in the way of time to make effective changes in the aftermath, or planning time if you’re able to spot a trend ahead of time. Having regular meetings also ensures that you’re able to tick off short-term goals that contribute to the larger goals in your organisation, rather than only measuring your progress toward achieving a large goal set out in your management review meetings. Quite often, the people in your organisation will need more support – be it time or resources – to achieve their goals on time, so if you meet regularly, they’ll be able to air their concerns, and as a manager, you’ll have a better idea of how the project is tracking along.

START AND FINISH MEETINGS ON TIME

On that note, an agenda ties perfectly into this point. In the absence of an agenda, you run the risk of getting caught in a tangent while your meeting runs overtime. This can manifest two problems: you’re either caught running over time and leaving important agenda items unaddressed, wrapping up your meeting because it’s gone thirty minutes over and people have things to do, and you risk losing the attention of members of your staff that aren’t engaged in the conversation, who begin to day-dream because the meeting isn’t over yet and lose real time that could be spent on other matters.

If you’re running overtime on a certain item, you can either organise a follow-up meeting with specific people involved in the project’s delivery, or you can create and plan to address it in the next session.

Keep Learning,

Kobi Simmat.