How to run a productive and engaging meeting

Executives spend on average 23 hours of every week in meetings. In one survey, 47% of people cited meetings as the biggest cause of time wasted at work. Ninety-one percent of people admit to having daydreamed during a meeting, 73% to working on other things, and 39% have actually fallen asleep. As one commentator wrote, “Most meetings are an all-out assault on the human soul.”

I would suggest that we do not so much hate meetings, we hate bad meetings. But often the issue is they are bad because we don’t prepare well enough, or spend enough time thinking about how we are going to run them. In this article, I focus on ways we can potentially improve both our preparation and running of meetings.

A popular meme on a t-shirt I saw recently said, “Survived another meeting that could have been an email!”. Generally, meetings are not needed for updates, where feedback is being sought, or where no decision or action is going to result. If an issue is not ready for a decision, request an update or feedback instead.

Only hold a meeting if all the key decision makers are going to be there, otherwise postpone.

Organisations are structured around routine, timetables and calendars, but sometimes we become slaves to the structure we create. If there is nothing to discuss, cancel or shorten a meeting and allow people to get on with their actual work.

Invite everyone who is necessary, but no-one else. Putting lots of senior leaders in a room for an hour is hugely expensive and has a significant opportunity cost. If people are going away from a meeting with no actions to follow up, it’s likely that their presence wasn’t really necessary.

Be clear what the objective of the meeting is and communicate this in advance. Objectives should be action oriented. Properly brief people in writing, prior to attendance. Each meeting objective should ideally have a short briefing memo addressing the key issues, and the decision required. While smart people may come up with ideas when put under pressure, they come up with their best ideas when they are fully briefed and have thinking time.

Establish an expectation that people come prepared having read documents in advance. This will save time recapping at the meeting.

Clearly communicate with all attendees what specifically you require them to contribute at the meeting. Moreover, invite and respond to questions before to the meeting, rather than adjourn to seek answers which could have been given in advance. Both can be done via email and should be specific.

Don’t invite mission creep – be specific otherwise people will assume you want their contribution on everything.

Check in on people’s views prior to the meeting. People are far more likely to tell you what they really think one-toone and this will give you an opportunity to work through any concerns so they are empowered to input into a decision at the meeting.

Research on circadian rhythms indicates that 75% of people are most mentally alert between 9am and 11am, and after 2pm our cognitive capacity for logical reasoning drops off. Time meetings accordingly.

Speaking of time, keep meetings short. Research suggests that the optimal length is just 30 minutes. If a meeting has to run past 30 minutes, use the Pomodoro time management technique of 25-minute periods on each topic broken by fiveminute breaks, but meetings of two hours or more should really be avoided.