Meetings and Team Performance, how can you make the most of both?
Having spent many years where I spent almost 90% of my day in meetings and struggling to find time to actually do any of the tasks I managed to pick up while at the meetings, I found Seth Godin’s posting “Getting serious about your meeting problem” a great list of ideas to try to make meetings more productive. Seth has 3 key messages:
- Make sure the meeting is necessary
- Make the meeting as short as possible
- Make sure there is tangible follow through on items discussed in the meeting
Communication is a key part of effectively working together as a team and so spending time meeting to discuss ideas or report back progress are necessary but treat meeting time as a scarce resource and make every minute count. I particularly liked his recommendation to allow participants to evaluate meetings. I recommend a “meeting audit”:
- Give all team members a 1 page sheet that shows the Monday to Friday work week in 30 minute increments
- Ask all team members to document the standard meetings they attend on a regular basis
- Ask them to rate each meeting from their perspectives – is the meeting useful, is their attendance necessary
- Ask them to identify how they would change things to cut their meeting time down by 50%
Take the feedback and be ruthless, from my experience companies just get into a meeting culture and feel just because you’ve always had a meeting it deserves to stay resulting in at least 50% of meeting time being unnecessary or not useful, task yourself with cutting that down. Keeping only the key meetings and giving people the gift of time will go a long way to improving overall team performance.
Lynn
Team Enthusiast
