As leaders, we all spend a substantial amount of our time in meetings. While it might be nice to eliminate meetings altogether, that’s not going to be possible, so the next best thing is to master meetings. Mastering meetings comes down to having a few core principles.
The Meeting Must Have a Purpose
Every meeting should be purpose-driven. Intentionality when it comes to meetings are that each meeting should have a set of topics, desired outcomes, and an attendee list. Each person on the attendee list should have a specific reason for being there. All of these elements should be documented and provided to attendees in advance, ideally along with expectations for each person’s contribution, so that they can come prepared.
The Meeting Must Require Live Collaboration
A lot of our meeting habits pre-date the use of Teams and Slack. However, consider if a meeting is truly required, or if modern asynchronous communication can get the job done. Remember, meetings are expensive, so they should only be held if the purpose cannot be achieved through other means, like group chats or email.
The Meeting Must be Necessary
The fastest way to reduce meeting fatigue is to apply this filter. Many meetings exist simply because they are on the calendar. Daily huddle to provide task updates? Set up an automated email in Monday or Asana instead. Question you need an answer to? Start a group chat. Need an authorization? Email the person responsible. Even if you can’t eliminate a meeting entirely, chances are you can reduce how much time it takes.
The Meeting Must Not Take More Time Than Needed
Ever have a meeting where everything was solved in fifteen minutes, but you somehow only “got back” 2 minutes at the end? That’s the meeting stretching out to fill the time allotted to it. Get in the habit of ending meetings early, or cancelling them outright, once the purpose has been fulfilled.
The Meeting Must be Documented
A sure-fire way to have a pointless meeting is to leave the meeting without any particular takeaways. Document what was discussed, what problems were solved, and what each participant needs to do going forward. Send these notes to everybody after the meeting has concluded. If necessary, reference the notes in your prep for the follow-up meeting.
If these sound like common sense, they are, but it’s easy to forget the fundamentals, and that’s when meetings start to become a waste of time. Thankfully, you can use a tool like Team GPS to set the meeting’s purpose ahead of time and document the meeting so the insights gained can be utilized later. We built the Group Meetings feature in Team GPS with these principles in mind, because the more valuable your meetings are, the better your MSP will run.
PREVIOUS POST: Difficult Conversations Made Easy
