Stop the Meeting Madness

Do you know how many hours you spend in meetings weekly?
On average, employees spend 4 hours and managers spend more than 10 hours a week in meetings and growing, according to research.

It is also estimated that 70% of employees experienced a 70% increase in meetings since remote work was introduced. According to LiveCareer’s latest study, 71% of meetings are considered unproductive.

It’s not just how long we spend in meetings, but the time it takes us to prepare for those meetings that keep us away from more important tasks, such as interacting with actual paying customers, preparing overdue reports, answering emails or planning ahead for next quarter.

Meetings take up an awful lot of time and energy in the workplace, which have a negative impact in everyone’s productivity. When it comes to the way you run meetings at work, ask yourself:

·      Do you and your people know what the meeting is about, as well as the intended outcome?
·      Is there a specific agenda and timeline to adhere to?
·      Do you often run out of time without achieving the desired outcome?
·      Do all participants feel comfortable sharing their ideas?
·      Are meeting outcomes and decisions available for people who didn’t go to the meeting and need to be in the loop?

Setting up a strong meeting culture that produces useful and effective get togethers requires planning and purpose. Here are some quick tips to help you optimize results in your meetings:

–       Set out a clearly defined meeting goal.
–       Design a well-structured agenda.
–       Communicate with all attendees in advance so they can prepare ahead.
–       Assign a meeting facilitator to control agenda and time and stay on task.
–       Enforce punctuality by all. Start and finish on time.
–       Shorten meeting duration, especially for virtual meetings.
–       Don’t allow off-topic questions or distractions during the meeting.
–       Don’t go on your phone and don’t bring other work with you.
–       Promote mutual respect and accountability.

Your meetings will be far more successful if people know why they’re there, what’s going to happen and how long it will take. You’ll also have more efficient and collaborative meetings if only the right people attend.

A final word of advice. Cut down on unnecessary meetings, which have a detrimental impact on everyone. If ongoing meetings or calls produce little to no return, it’s time to redesign your meetings calendar.

You can help your people better handle challenges, make decisions and solve problems faster and more efficiently by stopping the meeting madness and freeing up more time for them to do meaningful work.

As a leader, think twice before you call the next meeting. Instead, ask yourself, is there a better way to get my message across?

To your success,
Isabel
#leadership #culture #workplace #highperformance #success

Isabel is an experienced Peak Performance Strategist with over 20 years of international work experience holding senior positions within the hospitality industry in countries around the world, as well as Executive and Leadership coaching, mentoring and training. She specializes in high performance strategy, leadership development and building organizational culture to help leaders and their teams learn, grow and succeed. Isabel is passionate about helping empower business leaders with the mindset, performance, skills and strategies that they need to get ahead. More available on www.isabelvalle.com