Avoiding too many meetings
Ravi Shankar
Experienced Technology Leader. Excellent people leader and trusted advisor
Team members often compliant at the daily standups that they had too many meetings and couldn’t complete their planned work. A "too many meetings" complaint refers to a situation where an employee feels overwhelmed by the number of scheduled meetings they have to attend, often leading to decreased productivity, frustration, and a sense that their time is not being used effectively due to excessive interruptions in their workday.
Scrum masters and leads need to review the root cause and fix this issue; they can measure their worth in meetings removed.
Here are the strategies to lighten the meeting overload:
1. Cancel meetings without an agenda. Agenda should include the meeting’s goal, a list of topics to be discussed with their purpose, and time allocations.
2. Do the hardest part of meeting at the beginning instead of doing at the end; this will save a lot of time and you may close the meeting sooner.
3. You must send the minutes of the meeting especially the decisions that have been taken.
4. Make meetings shorter. If you reduce the meeting duration by 50%, you will discuss higher priority tasks first.
5. Implement meeting-free days at least once a week. This provides an opportunity for team members to focus on their work, hence improved productivity
6. Utilize asynchronous communication such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Trello; this enables team members to contribute to projects in their own time.
7. Don’t cross more than seven participants if you need to take decisions at meetings. Research suggests that for every attendee over seven participants in a meeting, the ability to make essential decisions goes down by 10%.
8. Be selective when accepting invitations. Politely decline meeting invitations that don't align with your priorities or could be handled differently.
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9. Record the meeting, if an attendee has higher priority task, he may listen to that at a later date
10. Block out “No meeting in your calendar” i.e. keep them busy and write the agenda of your work, so that people wouldn’t disturb you
11. Managers and executives shouldn’t schedule their meetings more than 30 minutes and record these meetings so that people can listen at a later date depending on their priority
12. Start your meetings always on time; whoever arrives late should bring a cake to the next social get together.
I would suggest to conduct a thorough review of all existing meetings and cut down as far as possible.
There are a few tips and I am sure there would be more. Please share your experiences.
? Thank you for sharing. You can also check out this related post:?? ? “Leading with Impact: Top Ten Tricks for Organizing More Effective Meetings”? ?? https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7289481252422709248? ? ? ?