Are your meetings becoming disengaging time wasters?
Seth Godin offers 9 tips to improve meetings. Here are 5 of the 9 ideas:
- Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
- Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.
- The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.
- Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.
- If you’re not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.
To read Seth Godin’s full list, click here.
Ensure that employees are engaged at your next meeting.
I will sometimes schedule an hour, but design for less when I know there is important dialogue that needs to happen. That way there is room for having the conversations that matter without having to artificially cut them off. You can always end early which people really appreciate. If nothing else people actually make their next meeting on time 🙂