13 Ways to Manage Meetings More Effectively

Just remember that in your career, you might end up spending more time in meetings than with your family. So it’s in our best interest not to make meetings so painful.

For many of us, taking meetings with prospects, clients, customers, and internal stakeholders is an opportunity to drive our business forward. However, more often than not, meetings end up being boring, unproductive, and repetitive.

If you’re like me and walked out of countless meetings thinking:

• Why in the world did I have that meeting?
• Maybe this meeting status update should have been sent over email or a message on Slack?
• Did people actually pay attention?
• Who didn’t attend that needed to be there?

Here are 13 time-saving life hacks for you so that next time you set up or attend a meeting, you make it count for your entire team!

1: Don’t have a meeting for the sake of having a meeting

Many roles in corporate life revolve around meetings. People forget that meetings are a means to getting to a solution. Rather they judge their productivity and success based on the number of meetings they have in a day.

Yes, I get you are a very busy person with 6 back to back meetings, but don’t have a meeting for the sake of looking busy or important. 

Steve Jobs said he did his best work when half his calendar was open for time to just think.

With all that done and said, avoid meetings like the plague unless absolutely necessary. That’s probably the best way to stay productive.

2: Don’t show up more than 7 minutes late to a meeting

We get it, your last meeting ran over because that started late. Maybe you went to the wrong conference room. Or you might have had to wrestle with your web-conferencing setup cause it just wouldn’t connect.

Whatever the reason, we’ve all been there and done that. It’s even worse when you start the meeting and people decide to trickle in after the 7 minutes mark. Now the meeting owner is stuck wondering if they should repeat everything from the beginning or get interrupted with questions later on. 

At Fireflies, we analyzed from 1,000+ calls and discovered that meetings that started beyond the 7 minutes mark, attributed to a net loss in productivity.

3: Do send necessary material ahead of time so everyone can read up

You should do your best to ensure the other meeting attendees will be ready for the meeting as soon as they sit down. Send necessary materials ideally 24 hours ahead of time via email or Slack so that they can prep and actively contribute to the meeting. If you or someone else is going to make a presentation, have it sent prior to the meeting for all the attendees to go through at a time that works for them, saving the meeting for Q&A.

Reading up before a meeting is a good etiquette that helps the entire team keep meetings short and at a faster tempo.

Many times you’ll realize the scope of the content isn’t worthy of holding a meeting. You’ll be amazed at how much will get done offline before the meeting.

4: Use meetings to discuss, debate, and make decisions

Meetings should be actionable. If you haven’t done your homework and are unready to discuss, debate, or make a decision, then you aren’t ready to have that meeting. Perhaps even more importantly, before sending out that meeting invite, ask yourself why this meeting is necessary and what that meeting will accomplish.

5: Avoid long-winded knowledge transfer sessions

Don’t waste other people’s time by getting them to explain what you could have learned offline.

If you ever feel the need to call a meeting just to get caught up to speed, you need to reassess how you keep abreast of developments at work. Yes I know it’s tempting for managers to hold a catching-up meeting by calling 6 people into a room and getting an update from each person. I am guilty of that myself.

Unless it’s a daily stand-up meeting/scrum, you’ll realize knowledge transfer sessions and getting up to speed can be done more efficiently one on one at your teammates desk.

6: Have teammates record their presentations ahead of time

At Fireflies, we found a neat way to save time for everyone. Instead of having a meeting where we have 1 person present/lecture/share facts, we instead ask the presenter to do a screen recording of themselves going through the presentation. That then gets sent out to everyone on the team.

I can then watch the video in my down time at 2x speed and quickly get through the content faster at a pace I see fit. This works well for us because now this knowledge recording video is also archived for later reference.

7: Invite the right people to the right meetings with the 2 pizza rule

Nobody likes being compelled to attend a meeting only to spend an hour listening to irrelevant blather and drawing doodles on their notepad. Likewise, none of us relish that feeling of doom in the pit of our stomachs when we’re told “That important piece of information you don’t know was covered in the meeting you didn’t attend.”People are what makes a meeting a meeting — so make sure you bring the right people! And think twice before you add participants. Too many people in a meeting is not good. Follow Amazon’s two pizza rule. 

Never have a meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group.

A person’s time is important and meetings are expensive, so don’t invite someone to a meeting unless that is the best possible use of their time.

8: Schedule and coordinate well in advance

When I worked at a larger org, there would be at least one meeting a week scheduled the day of or, at best, a few hours before. Yet many folks would be missing in attendance because they had other overlapping meetings scheduled last minute.

This happens to all of us. By scheduling meetings well in advance and being diligent about notifying the people you want to attend, your setting yourself up for success. Sometimes you might want to postpone the meeting because a key stakeholder tells you they can’t make it.

It is amazing how often meetings are scheduled at the last minute. Meetings should be scheduled well in advance whenever possible, and employees should not be afraid to tell their managers ‘no, I cannot attend a last minute meeting” if they have a prior commitment or legitimate time constraints on work they need to finish.

Scheduling the meeting well in advance is not only courteous to others and their time, but also means you can cancel without causing a major confusion. 

If an impromptu meeting needs to take place because of a critical deadline, keep the meeting small. Try to have a stand up discussion if possible instead of herding everyone into the conference room. 

9: Send a formal meeting agenda to avoid tangents

We all know that person who likes to derail conversations. Often they don’t even realize they’re doing it. Whether it’s with irrelevant or redundant questions or going off on a long tangent involving a detailed hypothetical scenario, often peculiar to themselves, there is almost always at least person in a meeting who can take it wildly off-track and down a long rabbit hole of unnecessary pedantry.

To avoid this — and it must be avoided at all costs — an agenda is the greatest weapon in one’s armory. Setting expectations is key. Let people know what the meeting will cover and, if need be, let them know what the meeting will not cover. A good rule of thumb though is that less is more.

A good agenda must have objectives. Make it clear what needs to be accomplished before everyone walks out of the conference room. 

List the decisions that need to be made. Allocate blocks of time to each topic; that way you avoid letting one topic dominate the entire meeting.

10: Have a strategic meeting facilitator

Meetings also require a facilitator to keep the meeting moving forward and on track with the agenda. This is usually the organizer of the meeting, but it’s best to make it clear before the meeting when sending out the agenda who will be leading the group through this meeting. 

The facilitators are often but not always managers, but it can sometimes make for a more productive meeting to have individual contributors facilitate because they are subject area experts.

The other benefit when this happens is people will feel more at ease to speak up and ask questions.

11: Please stop rambling

A lot of people love the sound of their own voice — don’t be that person! Other people feel like they can’t stop talking until someone else starts talking. And still other people feel they’ve not made their point unless they’ve tried three different ways of expressing it. In a meeting, you want to be like Ernest Hemingway, not Charles Dickens.

You have two ears and one mouth, and that’s the correct ratio of listening to talking.

12: Stop checking your email while someone is talking

On the flip side, don’t tune out completely. If you aren’t supposed to be in the meeting save yourself the trouble and politely excuse yourself. It’s tempting for all of us to just sit into the background and not pay attention. We hear our phone vibrating or just don’t find the current conversation worth our time. We pull out our phones or go to Facebook.

I’ve learned the hard way that rather than tuning out, it’s better to have an active mindset. If you don’t understand something, ask a clarification question. If something being discussed is not relevant to the meeting, mention it politely. Push comes to shove, end the meeting early if nothing tangible needs to be discussed.

13: Always document the takeaways and next steps

Firstly, document the meeting. There is nothing worse than having a fantastic meeting, where much discussion is had, decisions are made, action items listed, only for it all to be forgotten days later because no one took notes!

Send those notes out after every meeting. If you feel like you want to hold someone accountable, that’s a good move. We let our AI assistant Fred be our automated meeting note taker who writes up our meeting summaries so that everyone can stay fully engaged in the meeting without worrying about the notes.

Finally, use the last 5 or 10 minutes of the meeting to discuss and identify action items after the meeting. This goes back to the notion of making every meeting have some sort of tangible outcome.

Conclusion:

Meetings can be eventful or boring. The work done before and after a meeting really determine which category that falls into. It’s not easy to set aside time to do this right week in and week out. 

That’s why building it into the team culture helps the company get better as a whole where everyone can keep each other accountable. By putting a little more thought into how you operate, it saves your team hours every week and they will surely thank you for it.

Krish is a co-founder of Fireflies.ai where we are building an AI assistant that joins your meetings and automatically captures meeting notes.

Follow on Twitter: @krish_ramineni

Like what you are reading?

Subscribe to our blog.

#career #leadership #management #meetings #professional #corporate #workplace #productivity #studentvoices #business