How to run a great meeting?

Meet only when required, have an agenda, share minutes after, be on time and no multi-tasking

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Meet only when required, have an agenda, share minutes after, be on time, and no multitasking.

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I thought I had a strong opinion about meetings until I came across this quote from Dave Barry. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”¹

Apparently one of the reasons why humans can achieve projects of large scale is because we are the only species where a large number of individuals can work towards a common goal. Meetings are an excellent medium of communication which in turn is foundational to alignment. It is worthwhile to invest time and effort to run a good meeting because better meetings are associated with higher team productivity. And they drive organizational success². Employees(6 hours a week) and managers(23 hours a week) spend a lot of time in meetings. But 50% of meetings are bad meetings. You did not find your Ikigai role to spend hours in bad meetings. So, let us take a look at how to run a great meeting.

1. Meet only if a meeting is required

   • This is the most important piece to running a great meeting. The best meeting is one that does not happen. You know this because you have sat in a meeting that could have been an email. Let us take a closer look at when to call for a meeting³.

     • Get to know your colleagues

       This is a good reason to have a meeting. Coffee chats with your colleagues from across the company are more important in a remote/hybrid setting. When I ran a poll on LinkedIn, almost all the responses voted for a remote/hybrid setting. With the rise in remote work, even offices are starting to be thought of as social avenues than work locations. Meetings with the sole purpose of social interaction are therefore fair game.

     • Share information

       These meetings share information within and across teams in a company. Standups, Lunch and Learns, and Demos fall into this category. I am a fan of these meetings. Standup, for example, can also be part of your virtual commute. That said, status update meetings could be replaced with writing out a status update.

     • Solve a problem or brainstorm

       These meetings are used to discuss ideas to solve a problem. Design review, solution review, and debugging sessions fall into this category. Some of these meetings work better asynchronously. For example, solution design can be shared with the relevant members to review, in a google doc for example. A meeting may make sense to review any contentious/complex items.

     • Develop organizational strategy

       These meetings are also brainstorming sessions where instead of a technical issue like above, business issues are discussed. Here again, prework can save a lot of time, and allow the participants to focus on high-value items that require real-time conversations.

     • Debrief a team after key events

       These meetings are reserved to communicate key and time-sensitive information within a company. Or you can leave a tweet.

       Elon Musk @elonmusk

       Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!

2. Send an agenda along with any preread materials

   • Every meeting should have an agenda. This will help attendees come to the meeting prepared and ready to discuss the specific items on the agenda. Ever gone to a meeting without knowing what it was about?

3. End your meeting 1 minute early

   • Ending your meeting a minute earlier is a good strategy. This will give attendees a time box to work within. Apparently, work expands to the available time. Additionally, attendees with back-to-back meetings will thank you.

4. Capture and share meeting minutes

   • Writing things down is a good habit. After all, the faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory. This is much more relevant in the context of a meeting. A meeting without actionable minutes most likely is a waste of time. Minutes will also allow people who may have missed the meeting to get the gist of the discussion.

5. Choose meeting length

   • You do not have to have a 30-minute or 1-hour meeting. 20 minutes and 45 minutes are also good options.

6. Make sure that the technology setup is in place

   • Make sure attendees can join, share screen, etc, and whatever else is required to run the meeting smoothly. If you are using a new tool, test it out. The 5 minutes you spend preparing could save 5 minutes times of every attendee the meeting has started - at which point everyone would be wondering why you cannot share your screen. It is because Mac needs Zoom to have the security permission to share the screen - which will only take effect if you quit the application and restart. And when you quit, if you end the meeting, it will kick everyone out of the meeting. And now you have to slack/email every attendee asking them to rejoin the meeting using the same link. The specificity of the above example is purely coincidental and does not have any relation to my real experience. There is a statistic about the productivity lost in setting up technology at the start of the meeting. I cannot find the reference, but you have been there, right?

7. Be on time

   • If you are invited to a meeting. Be on time. This will allow you to leave on time. So, it will be a vicious circle⁴, but of a good kind.

     Ethan Mollick @emollick

     The science for starting your meetings on time! This paper finds that meetings which start late aren't just annoying, they are also much less productive and creative. And getting a reputation for late meetings is even worse: the anticipation of lateness has similar effects!

     

     

8. Do not multitask

   • If you think you can multitask, observe yourselves when you do. 9 times out of 10, you are ineffective at both. Turning your video on is a good antidote to multitasking. Just like our teachers knew when our eyes went blank in class, others in the meeting will notice your eyes scanning your social media or slack feed. That knowledge in itself can prevent you from multitasking.

9. Decline meetings where you are not required

   • Be mindful of the meetings that you accept. Attending meetings is not work. It is only a means to get the work done. Decline meetings where you are not required. Not attending meetings is like time travel. You now have an extra 30 minutes to work. Give a heads-up to the host though. Because being kind is always the right policy⁵.

10. Think twice before setting up recurring meetings

    • There are a lot of cases where recurring meetings are necessary. If there is a critical project, daily meetings are an easy way to unblock and make progress. But it is easy to fall into the trap of setting up a recurring meeting with no update to the agenda or minutes after.

11. Cancel meetings at least a day before

    1. The biggest loss to productivity with last-minute cancellations happens because of context switching costs. When you interrupt your task to prepare for an upcoming meeting, only to have it cancelled, resuming the task can take you up to 26 minutes⁶. Yeah, I was surprised that the number is that high. Overlay that with the likelihood that there are only about 4 hours of deep work in a day.

       

Go ahead and run some great meetings.

Edit on 8th Nov, 2022 - Atlassian provides this ritual reset framework to evaluate the value of different meetings.

Edit on 24th Feb, 2024 - How to meeting from NZS

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1. From Do We Really Need Another Meeting? The Science of Workplace Meetings

2. From Meetings Matter Effects of Team Meetings on Team and Organizational Success

3. Paper 1 returns

4. I came across the word vicious circle in my high school where an author referenced going to the dentist as such. Credit to the power of that example, I still use it in my everyday conversations.

5. I love this story about Jeff Bezos.

6. From No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work