7 Strategies to Make the Most of Meetings

In the corporate world, meetings are omnipresent. According to Forbes, there are 55 million meetings each day - and half of them are a waste of time.

But why?

Photo by Sean Pollock on Unsplash

Since I am working in a corporate environment, I’ve experienced a lot of meetings - roughly estimated, I attended about 3.000 meetings in the past 4 years.

Some were awesome, but some were total duds.

But you know what?

I’ve figured out 7 strategies to help you make the most of your meetings!

Let me share them with you.

Why do we have so many meetings?

We’ve all been there: a meeting with 14 or more people, only three are contributing, unmoderated discussions for half an hour, and then the things that bring forward the topic are compressed to the last 5 minutes before a meeting ends and no next steps are defined.

We all know that meetings can waste a lot of time, but we are still having a lot of them!

But why?

• Meet people: This one is rather obvious. As humans, we are social beings and we want to socialize and meet people. A meeting does that. Furthermore, if we are unsure about a topic, we can discuss it with others and get their opinions.
• Accountability: If you need stuff to get done, you often rely on other people. Some folks handle their responsibilities all by themselves, but others need a nudge or two. Having a meeting can help keep them accountable. If they know they’ll have to face a group of people and haven’t finished their task, it’s embarrassing for them. So, they’re more likely to get it done on time.
• Track the progress & share results: Of course, meetings are good for tracking the progress of a project or another endeavor and can be a great way to share their results.

Overall, meetings have their good sides. But to get the most out of them, we need to be smart about how we do them.

7 strategies to make the most of meetings

1. Prepare

A good preparation can save lots of time in a meeting. If a group of 5+ people first needs to understand a topic before they can make any significant progress, 15 minutes or more is the bare minimum to bring everyone on par.

I’d subdivide this strategy into two parts:

• If you are the host: Send out materials beforehand. This could be a one-pager, summarizing the topic the meeting is about, or at the bare minimum just a short text in the meeting invitation. Actively ask the participants to prepare for the meeting and ask them to do a simple task beforehand (e.g. read a 3-minute article). Will every participant prepare? Definitely not. But, if at least some of the attendees are prepared, the start of the meeting will be much smoother.
• If you are the attendee: If you didn’t get any material to prepare for the meeting, take a few minutes and think about the meeting’s topic and jot down three things you want to address.

With good preparation, all attendees can save a lot of time. In our example, the group could save almost an hour:

• no preparation: 5 x 15 minutes = 75 minutes
• with preparation: 1 x 15 minutes + 4 x 2 minutes = 23 minutes

2. Keep meetings small

To get insightful discussions going, you need at least a small group of people. However, if the group gets too big, unled discussions can quickly get out of control and eat up the majority of a meeting without making any progress

If the host is a good moderator, you can quickly get back control, but by reducing the meeting size to the minimum, you can mostly avoid non-constructive discussions altogether.

I’d again subdivide this strategy into two parts:

• If you are the host: Before sending out invitations to meetings, reflect on who is needed in the meeting. If certain stakeholders should be informed but aren’t needed during the discussions, think of sending them a brief summary after the meeting, or inviting them just to the final discussion (not the whole 3-hour workshop meeting).
• If you are the attendee: You got an invitation to a meeting and are not sure if it brings value to you or the host. Try to decline a meeting and tell the host she should call you if she needs something in particular from you. This won’t work every time (if the host insists on you participating), but this strategy can save you at least from some meetings.

3. Keep meetings short

We tend to plan meetings following our calendars and the most common meeting is 1 hour (at least in the part of the corporate world I know).

And as Parkinson’s law goes: the duration of bureaucracy and officialdom will fill its allotted period. Hence, the meeting will take one hour.

Lately, we have done a lot of projects in an agile way and I learned to love the stand-up meeting. It is a regular meeting (within a project) where all team members come together for 15-30 minutes and discuss their current progress and hurdles.

Why is it so productive?

If a meeting has to be brief, everyone has to get ready beforehand. This moves the discussion time to personal reflection and preparation, making them more effective as compared to being done in a large group setting.

4. Define a meeting goal

This one is straightforward: if you are the host of a meeting, define a meeting goal and publicly address it at the beginning of the meeting. This will prime all participants on the goal and if discussions get out of hand, remind all participants of the defined goal.

It can be handy to include the meeting goal already in the preparation documents or the meeting invitation.

5. Avoid discussing anchor problems

If anchor problems come up, try to identify them as such and write them down on a flip chart or a whiteboard to be discussed later (or just added to the meeting protocol).

If gravity problems - problems that are unsolvable (or unsolvable to the participants), also write them down to be added to the meeting documentation.

6. Take time to define the “next steps”

What brings a topic forward?

Most of the time this won’t be the meeting. It will be the action steps derived from the decisions made in the meeting.

Unfortunately, many meetings end before taking proper care of the next steps. This leaves the host back where she started and the topic didn’t move forward.

I’ve found that the part of the meeting where we talk about what to do next is crucial. Make sure there’s plenty of time to figure out the next steps and decide who’s responsible and when it needs to be done.

Even if it’s a one-hour meeting, try to reserve about 5-10 minutes specifically for discussing what comes next. You might need to skip other parts you planned to cover near the end and jump straight to talking about the next steps.

This works best if you are the host and in control of the meeting. However, if you are a participant you can ask: “What do I have to do next?” This can trigger the “next steps” section of the meeting or at least make sure you understand your responsibilities correctly. Hence, you don’t end up in those uncomfortable meetings where the host indirectly assigns tasks but nobody feels responsible and nothing gets done.

7. Follow-up

If you are the host of a meeting ensure to send a brief summary to all participants (and those who didn’t have the chance to attend), answering the following questions?

• What was the meeting goal?
• What were the main discussion points?
• What next steps were defined, who is responsible and what are the deadlines?

If you were the attendee of the meeting, ask the host for a brief summary and merge it with your notes.

To make the most out of your notes, engage with them after the meeting, do some post-processing (e.g. creating a progressive summary, and create links to similar notes. If you have a note-taking system at hand, it is even better.