In one of the most impactful titles, a Harvard Business Article from 2017, a couple of years prior to the pandemic, told us in no uncertain terms to “Stop the Meeting Madness.” They cited a story from one large company that spent 300,000 hours a year supporting a weekly executive committee meeting.

How often have we come out of a meeting and thought to ourselves?

• That was a total waste of time 

• There was no clear agenda

• We didn’t have the right people in the room

• It could have been an email

• We barely started covering the interesting topic when we had to adjourn

What's to a meeting?

The purpose of a meeting is to accomplish a goal but in many instances, we don’t join a meeting because we want to accomplish something, we join because someone invited us. We look at the invitee list and our VP is in the meeting, our CEO is planning to attend the meeting, our CFO has been invited and may share relevant financial data. We go to the meeting in person or over Zoom/Google Meet/Microsoft Teams -name your favorite video conferencing app-, and in some cases, are asked a question for which we did not prepare. “Let me get back to you” is an answer we’ve often used in response to a query. 

The meeting has to continue without that crucial piece of information and we make some decisions consequently. In some cases, it turns out that the answer would have taken the meeting in a different direction and could have led to totally different decisions. Consider the time wasted undoing the wrong decisions, and then communicating the change to the meeting attendees and the people with whom they communicated post-meeting.

The meeting organizer

It is critical for a meeting to have the basic structure that will make it effective. This starts with a clear agenda and people assigned to the agenda items. The meeting organizer has the responsibility of communicating with the folks who will contribute to the different topics and making sure that they are ready to cover their respective items. These folks must in turn make sure they have ample time to prepare for the topic they will discuss.

At a small company, organizing a meeting with a good agenda falls on a product manager, engineering manager, or team lead. Large well-functioning companies have a Chief of Staff role dedicated to helping leads (typically Vice-Presidents+) prepare for the meeting.

The meeting organizer has the responsibility to empower attendees with the resources/time to prepare to lead specific discussions. Sometimes that means chasing down those who own specific agenda items. The meeting organizer also needs to balance the meeting needs with other priorities vying for people's attention. There are only so many times you can ask someone for a favor so they work late hours to prepare material for a badly scheduled meeting. Instead you need to make it a standard operating procedure to ensure that team members can prepare and the meeting delivers the right outcome.

The meeting agenda

It is no wonder why a big focus of a meeting organizer needs to be a good agenda that is sufficiently communicated ahead of time and reviewed at the start of each meeting. Not only does an agenda help with organization of time, it also makes sure people focus on the topics being covered and don’t digress. I’m sure many of us have often used agendas to bring back a conversation that has digressed back to the goal of the meeting. It is a powerful and objective tool, where you don’t cut off people out of disrespect, but because you’re mindful of the time everyone is putting to make the most out of the time allocated.

The team members, the guests invited to the meeting, your partners will all thank you for helping them be better prepared and achieving the goal of the meeting. At Lighty AI, we are thinking about all these problems to make sure you spend your meeting time effectively on the most important tasks that matter to you and your team and by extension, the organization. If these are problems you care about, email me at <richard at lighty dot ai>.

— Richard

#meetingeffectiveness #meetingproductivity #meetingmanagement #meetingagenda #meetingorganization #stopthemeetingmadness #wastefulmeetings #meetingpreparation #meetingfacilitation #meetingbestpractices #meetingefficiency #productivityhacks #teamcollaboration #corporatemeetings #businessmeetings #meetingculture #agendapreparation #meetingplanning #meetingfocus #timemanagement