How did we end up with so many meetings? It seems there is never time to do any actual “work.”
Marketers go to more meetings than most people, though we’ve spent time at technology companies where meetings were pretty much all everyone did. I never could figure out how they actually built anything.
We haven’t found any way to eliminate meetings, but here’s a couple of ways to increase effectiveness and soften the pain:
- Be on time; start on time.
- Make sure you have agendas with specific timeframes for each agenda item.
- Stated purpose — helps keep the meeting on track. One major objective per meeting. Multiple objective meetings tend to ramble and get off track.
- I’ve found that meetings will fill the time you give them, so be efficient, and make them shorter. If the time adds up to 21 minutes, that’s how long it should be.
- Bail — your meeting culture should encourage people to leave when they are no longer needed.
comments
Maybe you need to add one more point before bailing:
“Process and Summary” - basically review the past few minutes, reiterate meeting content, affirm action and tasks if any, and review who agreed to do what by when.
Tarek El Heneidy :: April 29th, 2008
Thanks for your feedback - good points. We’re actually trying to cut our meeting times down a bit and wrap up hour meetings in 45 min. - and always doing a wrap-up so next steps are clear. Nothing worse than leaving a meeting and no one knows what they own…
Taylor :: April 29th, 2008
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