4 steps to fix your meeting culture

Meetings have always been the cornerstone of teamwork. People who are dependent on each other to achieve shared goals inevitably gather to connect, align, and drive progress. In fact, meetings are so vital that 37 percent of employee time is spent in meetings, and busy professionals attend over 60 meetings a month. With the number of meetings and participants today, there is also a great opportunity for noise to arise. Whether it comes in the form of unpreparedness, distractions, attendees not feeling included, and/or lack of follow-through after the meeting, meetings can be counter-productive.

After I posted my blog on my 3 favorite tools that will save you 3 hours a week, the most reactions came from my final paragraph. Here I spoke about a simple hack that can easily make your day a lot easier. So, I decided to dig a bit deeper and give you 5 tips to fix your meetings.

1. Shorten meetings and decline (longer) meetings

The average meeting length is 31 to 60 minutes. And that’s way too long because we simply do not have the attention span (yes, there is a reason that TED Talks are often shorter than 18 minutes). My 30-minute meetings have been reduced to 25-meeting and my 60-minute meetings are reduced to 45-minutes. Also, whenever someone invites for a meeting that is over 45 minutes, I simply challenge the other party to shorten the meeting. There is really no need to have long meetings as long as everyone comes in prepared and on time.

Now to this last point, if you indeed shorten your meetings you will avoid back-to-back meetings with no buffer time. This buffer time doesn't only allow you to wrap up the previous meeting properly, it also gives you some time to refresh (even if it's just 5 minutes) and to prepare for the next meeting.

2. Hold meetings with fewer people (max. 7 is the magic number)

Did you know that 7 is the maximum number of people to hold an effective meeting? In Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization, the authors found that seven is the optimal number of attendees when it comes to meetings. Any additional person at the meeting will result in a 10% effectiveness decline. It is also interesting to take a look at a psychological research on human memory by Professor George A. Miller of the Harvard University. During the research, the Professor observed that humans can only hold seven objects in their short-term memory at any given time (keep that in mind next time you are in a call with too many video streams on your screen).

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3. Approach meetings as a lifecycle

We need to start treating meetings not as disconnected experiences, but as a lifecycle of collaboration that relies on a series of meetings until the project is complete. Microsoft Teams, for example, supports this lifecycle by bringing everything the team needs for a meeting in one place. People don’t have to spend so much time hunting down information and contacts or switching between multiple apps. 

Before: To ensure the meeting is productive, participants can prepare ahead of time by reviewing previous meeting content and action items, collaborating on documents and presentations, and getting more context on who will be attending.  

During: Once the meeting begins, people can use a variety of features that help focus attention, drive engagement and foster inclusion (such as high-fidelity audio and video, live captions and translations, co-authoring apps, digital whiteboard, distraction-free backgrounds)

After: After the meeting, all the meeting assets – including the recording, chat, notes, digital whiteboard, and files are saved in a persistent conversation that helps the team continue the discussion and drive your work forward. Nothing gets lost in the cracks.

4. Make conscious decisions whether or not to attend

How often in a meeting, do we see at least one person in their phone or in their e-mail during the meeting. Not only is it contra-productive (it is impossible for our brain to multitask), it is downright rude towards the rest of the people in the (virtual) room.

About two years we, at Microsoft in The Netherlands, adopted a set of new rituals. One of which is that we allow ourselves and each other to make conscious decisions on what actions we take. For me, this relates directly to meetings. If someone invites me for a meeting without adding a goal for the meeting and it is unclear to me what my own gives and gets are, I decline the meeting.

On the other hand, if I do accept a meeting, I fully commit my time to be there and being aware, present and interactive. To me this means no e-mail, no Teams chat, no LinkedIn checking, just being present.