Make Meetings Relevant Again
“Faizul, how long are your committee meetings?”
“Typically for about 2 hours.”
“That is way too long. You should shorten it to 30 minutes.”
When I was leading UKEC during my final year, I had the conversation above with Dato’ Faiz, Chairman of PwC. Before this, I never really questioned about having frequent long meetings. I assumed that being busy discussing with the team meant that I was productive.
However, that incident made me question my assumptions. I needed to be effective with my time so that I had more time for my final year project. On top of that, I also need to ensure that nobody from my team commit more than necessary. I realised that talking about work is not the same as doing work. From then on, I made sure that we forced ourselves to ask a few relevant questions before having a meeting.
Can the tasks listed on the agenda be completed/discussed more efficiently on Trello/Google Docs/WhatsApp? If so, is the meeting necessary? What are the exact desired outcomes from these meetings? Based on these questions, we made a variation of the Eisenhower Matrix to make it easy for the rest of the team to follow.
As a result, we managed to cut down the meeting period from 2 hours to about 45-minute to 1 hour. I didn’t manage to cut it down further to 30 minutes; however, the incident taught me always to question our assumptions and think about how we can work more productively. Being busy is not the same as being productive.
There are always rooms for improvement. Feel free to share and discuss on how you make meetings relevant again for everyone.
Manages personal funds.
4 年If you have a framework of what are the things to be done, the recommended ppl for the job (and their alternatives, just in case 1st choice has other commitments/emergency) and proposed deadlines up to a month, it will speed up organisational work flow and cut down face time. Sharing your initial thoughts on editable meeting minutes like google docs with your team helps , but this sometimes depends on team dynamics and complexity of tasks at hand. Before sending out meeting invites, I usually use the 'details' section to describe what the meeting will be about in bullet points so everyone's on the same page or if they are team members who have different views they have sufficient time to articulate their thoughts and voice it out during the meeting. These are just my 2 cents ??.