Hands up if you if you would like to be in more internal meetings!

I thought not. The opposite is usually the case. Internal meetings can take up a lot of a senior people’s time, and when asked, many managers grumble that meetings are often a ‘waste of time’ or at least not a good use of time. Excessive meetings can hurt productivity, damage morale, delay change and cause stress – the list goes on.

How can you make these gatherings more effective, or even better, do without some of your meetings?

Review your meetings

In our experience as executive and business coaches, we often find that many hours can be saved every week by reviewing meetings across an organisation.

I use three specific ‘lenses’, developed since my days at JBBI. They are Priority, Amount and Quality (PAQ).

I encourage all managers to ask themselves:

Priority:

• How well does each meeting contribute to my vision / goals?
• What would happen if we didn’t have the meeting?
• Do I need to be in the meeting at all?
• Can I delegate this?
• Could somebody else be there in my place?

Amount:

• Could the meeting be shorter? Don’t let Microsoft dictate booking your time in its standard half hour slots! If you only need 25 minutes, why book 30 minutes?
• Could the format be different? Could I do it by phone?
• Do I need to be there all the time? Which elements of the agenda do I contribute to?
• Could communicating by other means reduce some of the face-to-face time?
• Are back-to-back meetings effective if I have little time to prepare?

Quality

Are the meetings effective?

• Is the purpose of the meeting and individual agenda points clear and specific?
• Is the agenda clear and time boxed?
• Are the right people there?
• Are action points clearly delegated?
• Is face-to-face the most effective format (phone meetings tend to be kept shorter)?
• Does a ‘sit down’ meeting prolong proceedings?
• Is everybody well prepared – if not, why not?

Ideas to challenge current behaviours

It’s healthy to challenge the norm, to question the relevance of meetings, who should attend and how long each meeting should take. A questioning culture cascades down through the ranks, so that everyone becomes more discerning in the way that they spend their time.

Here are some ideas to help you challenge your people so they might think and behave differently:

• If there are 5 people at a 1-hour meeting, call it a 5-hour meeting. The meeting is consuming 5 hours of time that could have been spent on something else. Was the meeting worth that?
• Build a culture of challenging meeting invitations, meeting chairs and meeting participants. Ask people if it was a good use of their time.
• Limit availability for internal meeting times to specific times of the day or days of the week. Yes – some people apparently only meet on Wednesdays. I recently coached a senior manager to shift from an internally focused role to a more outward focused role, without giving up any of his old responsibilities. He succeeded in restricting internal meetings to just two days by simply making it clear that the other three days he would not be in the office.
• If others are booking your meetings, make sure that there is time booked in between them so you can prepare yourself in advance and perform at your best.
• Don’t allow meetings to overrun. Build a strong time-keeping culture. When time is up – leave! Afterwards you may want to have a conversation with the meeting chair to see how their timing skills could be improved.
• Arriving, starting and finishing on time shows respect. Don’t reward late comers!
• Ensure meetings are finished strongly by summarising what was agreed – leave no loose ends.
• Keep reviewing meeting format and effectiveness at the end of each meeting and make sure the end-of-meeting review is taken seriously.
• Conduct a regular organisation wide review of meetings. They tend to build up with time, so there maybe some meetings that no longer add value and should be scrapped.

Respect time

Time is a very limited commodity. You should respect other people’s time and expect them to respect yours. It can be very challenging to change your own habits and those of others. It takes a real shift in mindset about your role and how you best contribute to your own and the organisation’s overall success. There is a lot to be gained by thinking more critically, and taking a more structured approach to use of time. A good coach, who can challenge and encourage you in areas like time management and managing change, can make a big difference.