The common stages of attending meetings as an employee:
- I can’t wait until I’m important enough to be included in those meetings.
- Yay! I’m part of the in-crowd.
- I will do anything to not have to attend this meeting…
Meetings are part of business life, particularly if you are a member of management. Many face the challenge of too many meetings each week. And these meetings take up time that could be spent on other tasks. And when particular meetings are no longer effective, they start to move from an annoyance to being detrimental to the work environment.
As a manager, you have a responsibility to ensure that your meetings don’t turn into a black hole on the weekly calendar. We have already spent time discussing how you structure effective one-on-one meetings. Today we are going to discuss how to be more effective with group meetings as well.
Each meeting should follow the basic rules. When these rules no longer apply, it is time to retire or restructure the meeting.
- Meetings have a purpose / agenda
- The meeting has outcomes
- It has a specific audience
- Recurring meetings have defined start and end dates
- And finally, be aware of the materials that go along with your meetings
Meetings have a purpose / agenda
Be clear on WHY you are holding a meeting. This reason should be clear to you and to your attendees.
- What are you going to be talking about?
- What are we going to get out of this?
- Who is presenting information?
- Who is the target audience and why?
Don’t meet just for the sake of getting together…
While sessions to raise complaints can be cathartic, they also become detrimental if there is no action that comes from it. Employees griping to management week after week with no change will eventually lead to disengagement as they will start to feel that “no one is listening.”
Common Agenda for Recurring Meetings
Even with team meetings or recurring weekly sessions that have a varied or changing set of topics, I follow a pretty standard agenda flow:
- Check for anything critical, on fire, or general announcements that need to come out on top.
- Sometimes people will wait to provide an update when they know a meeting is imminent, even with important communications. It’s a good idea to have a brief pause up front for these updates.
- While rare, there are times when a pre-planned agenda needs to be abandoned because something critical has occurred and the right audience is gathered in the meeting. In these cases, it’s important to quickly determine priority on this (and other topics) to identify if more discussion time is necessary.
- Then follow-up on “old business.” These are topics and items from earlier meetings.
- Each one is discussed, and the meeting leader (or the meeting attendees) determines how they fall into categories: resolved and closed, open but being worked, still open and needing escalation, or open but de-prioritized. For the last one, it is recommended to switch updates on the item to another format (such as email) or do less frequent updates.
- Also, this is also the time for any regularly recurring updates such as reports on metrics and KPIs, status updates, reports, financial reviews, etc. I don’t recommend that you do these recurring updates in every meeting. It is often better to provide quick metric or status updates in another format (such as email, online report, etc.).
- “New business” These are the new agenda topics from you or from your team.
Managing off-topic or deeper discussions
Sometimes agenda items create a longer discussion than intended. If this happens during a meeting that has multiple agenda items, it is the meeting organizer’s duty to recognize when these topics have grown enough to warrant a separate meeting or discussion. Don’t be afraid to suggest creating a separate meeting where people can go into a deep dive on a topic.
You will often find that people get off-topic in meetings, particularly with larger audiences or sporadic attendees. As the meeting organizer, you must be willing to call people back on topic & to the agenda of the meeting! I do this if I am the meeting organizer, even if it is my own boss or a CEO. Of course, you want to do so with tact, but most people will be appreciative of the mindfulness of limited time for all participants on the call.
With these side-topics, I follow the guidelines below.
- If the topic is critical (such as a major announcement or a big issue), and the right audience is on the call, I will typically allow the conversation to continue while relevant questions are being asked or decisions are being made. If a deeper discussion is warranted, I will often offer to create a separate meeting or to hold one-on-one discussions with participants to ensure the topic gets the attention it deserves.
- Sometimes if the side-topic is pertinent to the whole audience, is related to the general purpose of the meeting, and has value or importance for the team, it may be worthwhile to pursue the discussion. Be aware of overall meeting time though! If there is a lot on the agenda and/or meeting time is tight, ask to revisit at the end as time allows or in a separate meeting.
- If it is a worthy topic, but not the right audience or the right meeting scope, suggest that a separate one-off meeting be scheduled to review in more depth.
- But if the topic does not add any value, bring people back to the agenda and move on to the next item.
The meeting has outcomes
As you work through each of your topics on your agenda, determine what the attendees are meant to be doing:
- Is the topic being reviewed purely informational? Allow for questions, then mark it as completed & move on. Note that sometimes the same item will come up in later meetings again as someone has more questions, but typically these items will not be added to subsequent agendas for follow-up.
- Do you need someone to take action? If so, identify who is going to do something, what they are going to do, and get their commitment to follow-up outside of the meeting or in the next scheduled instance.
- Be sure you make note of who is giving the commitment and then check-in later (or during the next scheduled occurrence of the meeting) to ensure action was taken.
- While ideally you would like to have a timeframe or deadline committed, this is not always feasible. I typically don’t ask people to commit to deadlines or due dates immediately in a meeting unless the topic is either time sensitive or it has been brought up more than once and there is no movement taking place.
- Is this an update based on information or actions from a third party not in the meeting? Or, more often, lack of action from someone else? For example, someone on the team providing an update from another department. In these cases, the following needs to be determined:
- Does the person(s) in question need to be added to the next meeting? The action to be taken is to add them to the next meeting. However, take care not to add them to the full series unless required!
- Does an escalation need to occur or does someone need to take additional action beyond what has already happened? Have someone commit to escalating or taking the added action. It is not uncommon for the escalation to come from the meeting organizer, project leader, or a team leader in the meeting.
- Does the item need to be de-prioritized and removed from future updates?
Be cautious that you don’t always take the same actions on agenda topics over and over. If actions are not driving desired results, it’s time for something different!
It has a specific audience
Adding tons of people does not add to the effectiveness of the meeting. Instead, this is often detrimental to the efficiency of the meeting. When meetings start to have very large audiences, you will typically find that there are only a few key players who regularly participate in the actual discussion and provide input.
- If there are people who simply need to know what happened in the meeting, determine why they need to know and then take action from there:
- Do they need to know what transpired for information purposes? If so, this can frequently be solved with meeting notes provided via email or saved in a shared location.
- If they are going to be assigned action, you can add them. Or it may be easier to schedule a separate meeting, hold a one-on-one, or use another communication method where the actions & expectations can be outlined, the why can be explained, and additional information can be shared.
- If you need them to hold someone accountable to commitments, it is recommended that the meeting audience & focus is reviewed. It may be that the meeting needs to have more leadership or decision maker attendance rather than individual contributors.
- Sometimes you may need to add someone to a specific instance of the meeting. Take care not to add them to all instances, or to remove them from future meetings when their participation is no longer needed.
- As the meeting organizer, ensure you know why each attendee is on the invite list & remove people if their participation is no longer needed.
- A lot of audience bloat happens simply through poor meeting invitation maintenance. People are not often added haphazardly or without reason, but they may get added for longer than necessary.
- You may want to consider if you want to allow others to invite people to your meeting. While there is benefit to allowing others to add people to a meeting, this can also contribute to audience bloat. Sometimes employees will add their upstream managers for FYI purposes, or they intend to add someone to a single instance & instead add to the whole series.
Recurring meetings have defined start and end dates
Having a defined time helps to prevent “zombie meetings”. These are meetings that get left over when the organizer is no longer with the company or in a role. Some companies have started instituting maximum recurrence timeframes to aid in preventing these old meetings and to help manage the tidiness of calendars for any shared resources (such as meeting spaces, borrowed materials, etc.). This is easier to do with project-based meetings, but it’s a good habit for recurring team/update style meetings too. For recurring team meetings, I recommend using a three to six month time period for recurrence, depending on how much change is expected within the team. This aligns with standard business quarters and half-years. For groups with larger amounts of change, I recommend using shorter time periods so meetings are re-evaluated more frequently.
Having a defined time forces the organizer to recreate (and ideally re-evaluate) the meeting on a regular basis to determine if it is still warranted. In addition to determining if the meeting is still valid, you can evaluate the attendee list, the meeting length, and the frequency. All of these things contribute to good meeting “hygiene.”
And finally, be aware of the materials that go along with your meetings
The meeting invitation.
Too often the meeting invitation becomes a formality, and the details get overlooked. This particularly happens with recurring meetings or follow-up discussions. When you are creating your meeting invitation, be sure you use the following best practices.
- The audience / attendee list:
- Place your required attendees in the “to” list. If there are any mandatory attendees, ensure they are aware, and possibly called out in the body of the meeting invitation.
- Those who don’t need to attend every meeting, but frequently get assigned actions, etc. should be placed in the “cc” field.
- Subject is relevant & coherent. Keep it brief, but it should also specify why you’re meeting. Nothing is more confusing (or sometimes disconcerting) than getting an invitation that simply says “meeting” in the subject line!
- Basic agenda in the meeting body. See the notes above about having a meeting agenda.
- For meetings with larger audiences, it is also a good idea to note any key attendees in the meeting body. I also use this space to note why someone is optional vs. required.
Meeting Notes
Be sure to take thorough meeting notes and make them available to people afterwards!! These are critical for most meetings. Particularly if you tend to have a lot of meetings scheduled over the course of a week. It becomes far too easy to forget tidbits of information, or where or when you heard something that needs confirmation, remembering who told you those tidbits, etc. Shared meeting notes also help keep team members informed if they miss a meeting. Or they can be shared if you have someone who simply needs an “FYI” follow-up from a meeting.
I capture date/time/place if it plays a factor (for example – an on-site client visit). A list of who attended, and the shared meeting agenda. During the meeting, I take notes on topics covered, any pertinent commentary from participants, actions assigned, updates provided, etc. But as with just about everything, there can be exceptions to this rule. If someone has invited me to a meeting as an observer, and I have no input nor actions taken, I may be lax in note taking. If the meeting is a 15-minute stand-up for updates from the team, I will typically only capture key updates in a note once the meeting is complete, etc.
Slide deck / presentation
This falls firmly in the “maybe” category. Not every meeting requires this, and in fact, many of my meetings do not have one. I reserve slide decks for very specific use-cases:
- Trying to keep a variety of people on topic & structures in what they are presenting.
- Creating a format for conveying complex information
- Having a concise document that can be handed out to attendees (or non-attendees) as a short-hand form of meeting notes.
Meetings can be very useful. And they are certainly not going to cease being a key aspect of the business world. It is up to you to ensure your meetings don’t become another checkbox to fill in on the weekly to-do list.
