Modern business has developed a big problem with meeting culture. Many businesses see their employees' calendars littered with meeting requests that fill up a large percentage of their working week. Hours of meetings fill our available time to complete the physical workload. In a quick poll for this article, 17 of 19 people from various industries say they spend too much time in meetings each week. However, if you're seeing excessive meetings appearing in calendars, how can you fix the problem?
How to optimise work schedules
Meetings are an unavoidable and often a crucial part of running a company. They allow for shared information, team communication, and for creativity to flow. This article is not suggesting to cancel all meetings for the foreseeable future. However, there are four simple rules to follow to optimise your meeting booking process
1. Shorten the scheduled time
We often default to 30 or 60-minute meeting times due to the ease of blocking out calendar time. However, human beings will often fill all available space. If we have an hour to complete something, we will complete it just before the hour mark. The same goes for meetings. The conversation can easily divert off-topic or add additional agendas if an hour is scheduled. While this can be important for creative meetings, many focus on catch-ups, housekeeping, and planning. Keeping a concise booking limits the scope of conversations and minimises off-topic time wasting. Often 10-15 minutes will suffice for updates and check-ins.
2. Have an agenda
As with point one, conversations can often go off-topic. While this may be seen as a welcome break to some involved, others sitting in may become frustrated with how their time is being spent. If a meeting has been booked and multiple people's time has been allocated, it is only fair to use the time for its primary purpose.
3. Minimises who is in the meeting
Inviting a whole team or department to a meeting is often common practice. This is often justified by 'keeping everyone in the loop'. However, a summary email of the minutes can be just as effective for a team member outside of a project or who does not have anything to add to the topic.
4. Diversify the voices heard
Meetings can often be hijacked for self-serving purposes. For managers or members of a team to dominate a conversation with their opinion. A team is often composed of multiple personality types, and meetings are easy opportunities for dominant personalities to exercise their traits and lead this conversation. This is where the meeting host must come in and chair the conversation. Use their position as the lead in the meeting to bring everyone into the conversation. Meetings can use up an introvert's social battery and affect their performance later in the day. So, it is important to make this use of their time by giving them a chance to contribute.
Meetings are an important and unavoidable part of team building and company development. However, building in scheduling checks and plans around optimising their use can have a revolutionary effect on performance and morale
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