The Meeting Point
Meetings, the alternative to work, where the minutes are taken and the hours are lost. So many initiatives are created to make them more productive, keep people on point or just keep people out of them.
Something I’ve recently started doing is front loading the meetings in my day where possible. This helps by ensuring that when actions come out of the meetings there is time in the day still to do them. This also helps to ensure that when things come up during the day that have to be taken care of urgently, you are less likely to have to move meetings to accommodate them. This helps reduce one of my meeting pet peeves, meeting procrastination. If I have to move a meeting then I will move it once and do everything I can to make sure the newly arranged time is met. Obviously there are exceptions but if I have to move a meeting a second time, I really put some consideration into whether the meeting is actually needed, considering we have survived this long without it.
Another key to reducing the meetings in your diary is delegation, or more specifically ensuring that the right people are in the meeting and the wrong people are not. If a member of your team can contribute more to the meeting than you and you are both in the meeting, why are you in the meeting? There are too many meetings that contain people who are not contributing. If they are not needed, it is the responsibility of the meeting host to ensure they are not there. There are alternatives to this, for example Elon Musk’s 3 meeting rules:
- No large meetings
Make sure that you are not inviting people who don’t need to be there, try and keep the numbers as low as possible - If you’re not adding value to a meeting, leave
This is one I’ve used in the past but disagree with now. We would have people complain that they were wasting their time being in the meeting so we started telling them they could leave whenever they wanted. Once decisions were being made without their input they soon stayed in the meeting until the end. So this meant they were needed. This comes back to the previous point, if they are not adding value, the host should not have invited them. - No frequent meetings
This is another one with a grey area. I think frequent meetings for Agile ceremonies are very much needed and these are not as painful as some make out. Working in an Agile environment, sometimes it can feel like there are a lot of meetings. Stand Ups, Sprint Planning , Retros, and that’s before the unofficial Agile meetings like Story Grooming sessions. You’ll find that there are just as many meetings using Waterfall but we don’t think of them because they are not named. Meetings such as catch-up with Jeff, workshop with Maria and so on. These ad hoc meetings quickly add up but without the recurring named meetings, they are quickly forgotten and never seem to happen as often as they do. If you are running a project then having regular meetings to touch base is very much necessary. Where I would agree with Elon is if this frequently recurring meeting is not needed and will not add value then it should be cancelled. We have enough to do without having to attend a meeting with no agenda.
Speaking of meetings with no agenda, there are behaviours that should be considered for every meeting without fail: - All meeting should have an agenda
- All participants should know why they are in the meeting and what they are expected to contribute
- Checking emails and messages in the meeting should be strictly forbidden except in extreme circumstances
- Everyone in the meeting should be listening and hearing what the person speaking is saying
These may seem obvious but you would be amazed how often these behaviours don’t happen.
So meetings are important, they are very much needed but they need rules, and they need to have a purpose and an outcome. If you find yourself in endless meetings where you are not contributing, ask the host why you have been invited and what you are expected to contribute. It may be you are needed but not for the whole meeting. Things like this need to be considered. Next time you arrange a meeting, take a step back and work out how much this meeting is going to cost is salaries per hour with all those people sat there. Can the meeting be shorter, can the information be sought in another way, is there an alternative that would work?
