Meetings

What To Do About Meetings if You’re NOT in Charge:

Come Ready to Play (Together):

When you are called to a meeting, one of the best things you can do to make things run smoothly (and effectively) is commit yourself to being 100% present. Bring all of yourself to the meeting and set aside everything else that needs your attention.

Check Your Guns at the Door:

It’s really hard to set aside distractions in a meeting when your phone is buzzing in your pocket every 5 minutes. It is rare that someone is so very important that they cannot be incommunicado for an hour or two. Obviously, there is the occasional emergency situation that may require your attention, but if you consistently leave your phone on during meetings, you are sending a very clear message to your colleagues that you are not committed to the endeavor. And, from my discussions with people at every level of organizations, I can tell you that everyone else thinks it is very rude to leave your phone on.

Listen Deeply:

Listen not only to what is said, but also to the feelings beneath the words. Frequently, the contentious issues that arise in meetings are influenced by the participants’ personal feelings about any number of things: the state of the industry, the state of the organization, their own personal life, their relationship with others in the meeting, etc. When we listen to the feelings beneath the words, we can begin to respond in ways that address the real core of the problem. You should also listen deeply to yourself. Strive to achieve a balance between listening and reflecting, speaking and acting.

Identify Assumptions:

One of the things that we have spent a lot of time focusing on in our workshops this year is the impact that our underlying assumptions have on how we see the world. Underlying assumptions are unsurfaced beliefs or premises that we take as given or true even though we may not express them out loud. Assumptions are not necessarily true, but without evidence or questions, we treat them as true. By identifying our assumptions, we can then set them aside and open our viewpoints to greater possibilities.

Suspend Judgment:

Set aside your judgments. The goal of working together with others, ultimately, is to generate solutions to problems that are more creative and innovative than an individual is able develop on their own. Sometimes, these solutions require us to put our questions and doubts on hold and just go with it for a while. By creating a space between judgments and reactions, we can listen to the other, and to ourselves, more fully.

When Things Get Difficult, Turn to Wonder:

If you find yourself disagreeing with another, becoming judgmental, or shutting down in defense, try turning to wonder: “I wonder what motivated him to say that?” “I wonder what my reaction tells me about myself?” “I wonder what she’s feeling right now?”

Finish that thought.

When’s the last time you found yourself sitting in a meeting thinking, “I’m really glad we all got together to hash this out. We should do this more often. These meetings really expedite the work in this office.”

Can you say “NEVER!!”? That’s what I figured. The sad fact is that we seem to be addicted to meetings in the workplace. According to one recent study, approximately 11 million meetings occur in the United States every day and about 91 million workers spend time in meetings each week. The New York Times cites one study that finds, “For most, it's one to eight hours, but a hardy 11 percent of men (men are far more meeting-prone than women) somehow survive 13 or more hours of meetings a week.”

Meetings are a . . .

If you’re one of those workers who attends meetings, do me a favor and answer the following questions:

1.Do the meetings I attend have a clearly identified goal or purpose?
2.Do the meetings I attend have an agenda or plan for how the meeting will take place?
3.Do the meetings I attend have time limits that are abided by?
4.Could the meetings I attend be more efficient?
5.Could the meetings I attend be done away with altogether?

If you answered “yes” to the last two questions, you’re not alone. “Most professionals attend a total of 61.8 meetings per month and research indicates that over 50 percent of this meeting time is wasted. Assuming each of these meetings is one hour long, professionals lose 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings, or approximately four work days.” The respondents of the Microsoft survey attended meetings for fewer hours each week -- 5.6 -- but an astounding 71 percent of them thought that those meetings “aren’t productive”! Considering these statistics, it's no surprise that meetings have such a bad reputation.

Couple those findings with other research about the ways that time is wasted in the workplace and the causes of productivity problems begin to emerge. Just FYI, from another NYT article -- A Microsoft study found that American workers spend an average of 45 hours at work per week, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive.” America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

-- Thomas Sewell

Seriously? Does that last statement indicate that the hour and a half I spend reading RealClearPolitics in the morning is not actually work? Isn’t it important for me to be abreast of the latest political developments that might somehow impact the psychological mindset of the people with whom I work. No? Hmmm.

If productivity at your workplace isn’t where you think it should be, you could do a number of things: disconnect the internet; install cameras that monitor every worker so that they’ll feel like they’re being watched and will be more productive as a result; or you could just cancel all meetings.

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You’re right, none of those is really a feasible option and some of them might make your workers feel undermined and defensive -- which, I’ve found is not the best way to get them to give you their all. So, what to do?

Well, if meetings take up a significant portion of your day, and if 50 to 70 percent of your time spent in meetings is unproductive or inefficient, it makes sense to me that meetings are a great place to start boosting productivity -- and probably morale, too.

What To Do About Meetings if You’re in Charge:

"In our training program, we talk a lot about meeting discipline," says Michael Fors, corporate training manager at Intel University. "It isn't complicated. It's doing the basics well: structured agendas, clear goals, paths that you're going to follow. These things make a huge difference."

Take a Cue from Intel:

Intel is a company that takes meetings very seriously. Every employee is required to take the company’s course on effective meetings, originally taught by CEO Andy Grove (talk about sending a message to the people). In every Intel conference room, a poster is hung that lists a number of questions to ask about meetings that take place there: Do you know the purpose of this meeting? Do you have an agenda? Do you know your role? This simple tactic emphasizes the company’s commitment to effective meetings and reminds workers to stay focused and take their time in meetings seriously.

"I decided to talk with some of America's most successful and respected leaders in business, labor, industry, education and government – many of whom are viewed as masters in the art of conducting meetings – to gain their insights into the subject. In speaking with over fifty of those leaders, two central points emerged. Number one, the skill to manage a meeting – to develop ideas, to motivate people and to move people and ideas to positive action – is perhaps the most critical asset in any career. And number two, most professionals have had no real training in devising and managing an effective meeting; in fact, most professionals do not recognize the enormous impact their meetings have on their organizations and their careers."

-- George David Kieffer, The Strategy of Meetings

Do the Legwork Before You Get There:

Can you answer the 3 questions from the Intel poster about meetings that you have been in charge of? If not, then you need to take care of the basics: Identify what you want to accomplish with the meeting and articulate it to everyone. Tell everyone how long the meeting will last -- and stick to it. In fact, it’s better to overestimate and let them out a bit early. And, for goodness sake, plan an agenda! It doesn’t have to be typed with the company logo at the top and appropriate Roman Numerals next to each item, but it does need to be clear, precise, and available to everyone in the meeting.

Show a Little Tough Love:

If you are the one who got the meeting together, it’s your job to keep it on track. That means that when discussion begins to stray away from your identified goal, even to other work-related issues that you may be meeting about later in the day, you must reign everyone back in and keep them focused on the issue at hand. Because, even if you solve the problem that another meeting is intended to address, my bet is, you’ll still have the meeting and you’ll spend as much time talking about the issue then, too.

Meetings are a fact of office life. Although we’d all like to stage a coup and implement totalitarian rule at times, we know that working cooperatively with others is usually worth the time and effort. But we can make the time and effort more meaningful and productive with just a few tweaks in how we approach meetings.