These Meetings are Too Long

Maybe we should have a meeting about it

I came across this post on social media this morning.

“Leave them wanting more. Consider cutting — at least mentally —
your meeting time by at 20-30% to make sure you focus on the right things first,
and to understand that your goal may be to have them wish for more time,
or even another meeting.”

Take time to think about the meetings you schedule with your team. Are they too long? Are some people sitting through discussions that they don’t need to sit through?

Just because YOU (as the team leader) need to be in all of those meetings does not mean THEY need to be in all of them, too.

Are some of your people enduring 90-minute meetings in which only about 10 minutes are relevant to what they do? If so, that is a waste of their time… OR they will start doing something in the background (checking emails, turning off the camera and working on other projects, etc.), and that may be reinforcing terrible listening habits and teaching them behaviors that disrespect the speakers. Neither one is good.

Have all-hands meetings for things that are relevant to the whole team. Have an agenda, and keep these meetings short and focus on the priorities from the start. Schedule smaller-group meetings for different project teams. You can even do this in the all-hands meeting: “The design team should stay on after this first meeting ends so that we can discuss X. The sales team meeting will be tomorrow at 10am—Kim, Jill, José and Bob should join that one, as well. Greg, let’s have a one-on-one to talk about the proposal status at 2pm today. Does anyone else have something we should discuss this week?”

Set your expectations that people will pay attention in meetings (come to the conference room on time, turn off email alerts on their laptops for the duration, put their phones on silent and place them face-down, keep their cameras on turning Teams or Zoom calls, etc.). Make those meetings feel valuable and productive by keeping them on-track and short.

(Source: https://post.news/article/2M5k02s5JjEF0HEJcuBobUu0zrn)
(image source: Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash)