Suggested Best Practices for Creating Effective and Productive Meetings

Overview

The purpose of this document is to help meeting organizers and attendees hold more efficient, purpose-built meetings. Recent studies have shown that ineffective meetings (either because they are poorly organized or poorly run, with the wrong people or too many people in attendance) costs companies thousands of dollars each year. In fact, the best estimate has it at over $40+ billion annually. Keep that in mind as you plan your meeting.

Interested in how much the meeting you are planning is about to cost your company? Use this Meeting Cost Calculator (developed by the Harvard Business Review team) and see for yourself (it's also an iOS and Android app)! Then, think twice and carefully as you move forward with your meeting plans.

Here are a few quick, but useful, options to consider prior to creating your meeting that can help ensure your meeting will be efficient and effective. These options can be divided into four categories or phases, as explained below. Another factoid to keep in mind is that most of us spend at least half of every working week in meetings, regardless of whether any particular meeting was useful or not.

1. Thinking about the meeting's purpose
2. Deciding how you will organize and conduct the meeting
3. Keeping the meeting on track and aligned with its purpose
4. Following up on meeting AIs to move the ball down the field

Thinking About the Meeting's Purpose

Before jumping right over to Google Calendar and scheduling your meeting, take a few minutes to contemplate your reasons for having this meeting. Before you send out a meeting request, briefly consider:

• Why do you want to have this meeting?
• What is the expected outcome?
• Who is this meeting for (who should attend)?

Why do you want to have this meeting?

Consider using the story model you are already familiar with to create a user story for why you want to call a meeting. For example:

As a Product Manager, I need clarity on progress to date on the releases feature set.

Or,

As a Developer, I need to review the backlog and create a map for closing as many bugs as possible.

By doing so, you should have a clear idea as to the "why" of the meeting as well as clarity on whether a meeting is the best option for solving the issue or task on your plate.

What is the expected outcome?

Once you have established the meeting's purpose, focus on your expected or desired outcome:

This meeting will provide a path to solving some problematic scheduling issues.

Or,

By the end of this meeting, we will have agreement on a targeted list of features for next release.

Without first defining the above items, your meeting might not produce the outcome(s) you're hoping for.

Who is this meeting for (who should attend)?

It's easy to think that everyone with a vested interest, no matter how small, in your meeting's topic should attend. But consider that some "attendees" might actually be stakeholders who might only need to be informed of the decisions made during the meeting in a follow-up email or Slack message.

Without first defining the above items, your meeting might not produce the outcome(s) you're hoping for.

Choose Attendees

You should consider inviting attendees based on:

1. Expertise
2. Stakeholder ownership level
3. Decision-making abilities/power

This might seem obvious, but all you really need are a small set of experts and, if none of these are decision makers, a decision maker with authority to "bless" conclusions reached during the meeting and the action items that fell out of those decisions.

About 'Optional' Attendees  

If you are using the "optional" setting in your meeting invite as a way to inform a person about your meeting, but have no expectations that they'll attend, please don't invite them as an optional attendee, instead let them know about the meeting another way, such as email or slack. If they want to attend, they'll let you know. Please consider simply reporting the results of the meeting, such as the meeting notes or the action items, in your status report here on Confluence or whatever system you use. This will cut down on emails or slack messages as well.

Deciding How You Will Organize and Conduct the Meeting

There are two key factors to consider as you go about creating your meeting:

1. Deciding on the meeting platform
2. Building the meeting's essential components

Deciding on the Meeting Platform

The next factor to consider is the venue or platform. But your choices are not simply whether to use Zoom or Google Meet, it's whether to hold the meeting at all with all members present at the same time. There are alternatives to meetings you should consider to allow for asynchronous participation around the globe and across multiple timezones.

One good way to allow for participants to be heard asynchronously is to create a document in Google or Confluence and invite all attendees to comment. Create a window for participation and use the document to collect data and observations in a given timeframe. This plan still has the option for a followup meeting with a subset of the original team participating, if necessary.

Read the GitLab article, Embracing Asynchronous Communication for a look at how to work asynchronously across your company.

Building the Meeting's Essential Components

There are three essentials to creating an effective meeting. They are:

1. Create an actionable agenda
2. Assign a meeting facilitator (could be you) and notetaker
3. Select time slot carefully to be sure not to overlap existing time commitments

These three items are discussed below.

Create an Cctionable agenda

Think about what you want to get done in your meeting: goals and targets. Set up your agenda to match your goals and include times/durations (see example below). Include an "Intro" and/or a "Q & A" section, at your discretion and as fits your meeting attendees.

Below are a couple of example meeting agendas, one showing duration only, and one showing start and stop times for each agenda item:

Intros: 5 mins
Topic A: 10 mins
Topic B: 10 mins
Q & A : 5 mins




Intros: 11:00 - 11:05 AM
Topic A: 11:05 - 11:15 AM
Topic B: 11:15 -  11:25
Q & A : 11:25 - 11:30 AM

Remember this corollary to Parkinson's Law when planning your meeting:

Meetings will expand to fill the time allotted.

So, if you schedule an hour, the meeting will last an hour (or even go over!), so consider whether 30-minute meeting might get the job done.

Assign a meeting facilitator (could be you) and notetaker

Typically, you will be both the meeting facilitator and the meeting notetaker. Consider that, though common, this might not be the ideal arrangement. If you have a particularly complex meeting where you need to discuss all the details, ask someone to take notes and perhaps that same person can facilitate the meeting.

Select time slot carefully to be sure not to overlap existing time commitments

Scheduling your meeting on top of attendees current scheduled meetings is disruptive and causes morale problems. This is because attendees have to either decline a meeting that they otherwise would have preferred to be at, or reach out to the organizers of the conflicting meetings and ask them to reschedule. Or perhaps, be forced to make a decision about which meeting of two (or sometimes three) they should attend. Remember, employees are hired and paid to be productive, and being productive means attending as few meetings as possible. Again, from the Harvard Business Review:

Creating Recurring Meetings using Best Practices 

For recurring meetings, consider limiting the number of occurrences to only a few. Poll attendees at either the final or penultimate meeting as to whether they consider the purpose of the meeting series has been accomplished. If not, extend the meeting a few more iterations. If you're all set, no further action necessary. This will help clean up some calendars at the company where the recurring meeting going on for months or years is actually a placeholder and will be cancelled each and every week.

Send Invite

With your agenda in place, select your attendees and time with focus and try not to invite unnecessary participants (if they knew, they'd thank you) and that you don't double-book key participants. Move the meeting to another day or time, or even to the following week as needed to ensure the right team is in place in the meeting. 

Keeping the Meeting On Track and Aligned with its Purpose

Keep in mind the following five key success factors as you run your meeting:

1. Staying on agenda
2. Keeping the meeting on track
3. Taking notes
4. Assigning Action Items (AIs)

Staying on Agenda

You have an agenda for a reason; two reasons, actually:

1. Make sure the topics you needed deliberated are discussed and that you don't run out of time
2. Keeping participants on track and on time.

Keeping the Meeting on Track

Be sure you stick with the time you indicate on the calendar invite, and don't veer away from it if you can possibly help it.

Start on time, end on time! Studies have shown that starting late and, especially, ending after the indicated end time hurt both morale and productivity. Don't do it!

Taking Notes

Take notes as needed. If it's covered on a slide or other material, capture only the high-level information. Along these lines, capture the important highlights in the discussions that happen during the meeting. Some sidebars won't need to be documented, but others should be if they help the team meet the goals of the meeting.

Assigning Action Items (AIs)

Be sure to assign specific tasks to the correct "D.R.I" (Directly Responsible Individual). Hold them responsible and follow up regularly.

Following up on Meeting AIs to Move the Ball Down the Field

Distribute all collateral as soon as possible. These include:

• meeting notes
• slide deck
• meeting recording
• any other related documents or materials.

Conclusion

Those are the basics for getting the most out of fewer meetings. As you no doubt noticed, like many best practices it all boils down to common sense.

Do you have any tips from meetings you've created for things that have worked well for you? If so, please leave them in the comments.