A 10-step strategy to making meetings more productive

Executive coach and psychologist Dr Karen Morley is an expert in achieving work-life balance, even in an ever-changing world. Her book, FlexAbility: How high achievers beat burnout and find freedom in an overworked world, was released late in January and does just as the title promises to do: help high achievers find balance.

In this extract, Karen explores the 10 ways to make meetings more productive and limit wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere.

FlexAbility by Karen Morley. Source: supplied.

A key aspect of organising work is to set an appropriate cadence for meetings, with clear agendas and frequencies. Meetings are one of the most common methods we use to get work done, yet they are one of the biggest time sinks of the working day. Question the purpose, focus and duration of all meetings to ensure that they contribute the right value. According to meeting consultant and researcher Steven G. Rogelberg, about 50% of meeting time is considered ineffective, so there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement.

Imagine a schedule of meetings that creates positive and energising outcomes, improves your decision-making, increases team cohesion and motivation and saves you time! How much more you could love your work! It is possible, but only if you get rigorous about your meeting cadence.

Rather than accept that time confetti is an inevitable consequence of a busy 21st century working world, see yourself as a time steward. Leadership is a service to others, including to their time. Time is a precious resource, not something to fritter away like confetti. Be intentional about making smart meeting choices so that people love attending them and get quality work done.

Many leaders tend to be caught in the grip of a continuous stream of meetings, leaving little time for thinking and reflection. Remote meetings via videoconference seem to exacerbate this. This was part of Dev’s problem: 12 hours of back-to-back videoconference meetings daily were taking a heavy toll.

Meetings are fine when they have a clear function, purpose and agenda, and are facilitated well. But when they’re continuous, it’s almost impossible for them to be productive. There is simply not enough time to prepare, or to follow up. When they are poorly run, they waste not just time but emotional energy, as people need to recover from them!

Establish a routine of meetings that help get good work done. Help yourself and your team to manage your time and outputs well and stay connected to, and engaged with, each other. Here’s how:

10 steps to better meetings

1. Reduce the number of meetings you have and make them decision-based; share information in other ways

2. Always give yourself a time buffer between meetings: don’t schedule them back-to-back

3. Reduce meeting times — make them 15 minutes or 25 minutes, not 30 minutes. That helps with breaks. It also helps with focus; when there is a degree of time pressure, we increase our focus and engagement, which improves meeting performance

4. Prepare well. Engage people in creating the agenda — always have a clear, action-oriented agenda — and confirm it, clarifying the decisions that need to be made. People then have a clear goal and intent to guide their participation

5. Invite only those people required to make the decision

6. Begin with the most important items

7. Use inclusive practices such as taking turns and inviting contributions to give and get full value from each person

8. If the meeting is remote, record it so that others can review it. They can save time by reviewing at double speed

9. Make meeting endings explicit. Confirm the agenda that has been covered and the actions that have been agreed. If you finish early, reward everyone by allowing a recharge break

10. Always follow up on outcomes and responsibilities in due course

One further note regarding point 3, meeting times — while reducing the length of meetings is generally helpful, the reverse may be true for some meetings. You may need to make some longer to allow time for deliberation, creativity and debate. Making sure the meeting length is fit for purpose is what matters.

Stop exhausting your conscious mind by careening from one meeting to the next, making lots of minor decisions that often don’t work out or get follow-through. Save your brainpower for where it really counts, where it would do most value and where you would feel most satisfaction.

These are the meetings that matter most

Many leaders get trapped in a cycle of problem-solving meetings. Instead, establish a structured cadence of meetings, such as these listed here, to proactively manage your team’s shared work:

• One-to-one check-ins with each team member

Focus on personal connection and building relationships. In these meetings, you are in service to your team member. What’s on their mind? What’s working well? How are they dealing with their latest challenge? What help can you provide them? What do they need more information about? What progress are they making? These meetings should happen weekly.

• Team check-ins

Focus on progress. These should happen roughly fortnightly and focus on shared work goals and problems.

• Monthly check-ins

Focus on cohesion. They allow time to attend to team norms, dynamics and cohesion, and to surface shared issues.

• Alignment check-ins

Focus on direction and purpose. These need to occur between monthly and quarterly, depending on how well your team works together and how much remote work you are doing. They help to celebrate progress, provide news about major updates and engage with senior leaders on organisational priorities. These sessions allow the team to work on the team, to renew psychological safety and trust, engage newer team members, recalibrate major team processes, call out and resolve conflict and increase collaboration.

• (Bi)annual check-ins

Focus on strategy review and reset. These should be longer meetings held every six to 12 months, providing a focused opportunity to review and reset strategy. These meetings take more planning and create more significant follow-up actions.

Organise your meetings around a focused structure and cadence to increase their value. This sets you up well to both identify and then deliver on priority work.

This is an edited extract from FlexAbility: How high achievers beat burnout and find freedom in an overworked world by Dr Karen Morley, available now at Booktopia.