Congratulations to our client Connect Your Home for being named the Top Performer of 2014 by Time Warner Cable! Just one more example of the creativity and ambition on display every day at Connect Your Home!
Connect Your Home is the nation’s premier home services providers offering television entertainment, broadband, and security products from the world’s leading brands.
Company meetings are the butt of many jokes and a central theme of the Dilbert comic strip. In most cases, the common business practice of meetings deserves this place in our collective satire. But they don’t have to.
Here are three things that can immediately shorten meetings and improve productivity within those meetings.
I know this seems obvious but I am routinely surprised by how often I participate in meetings that are carrying the burden of 12 or more people’s salaries, productivity and untold opportunity costs without an actual agenda. An agenda that keeps the group on task is a must. Recurring agenda items can be a great way to set expectations around subsequent meetings which helps to shorten meetings while covering the same information. If people know what to expect, they will be more prepared and the detail provided will be of much higher quality.
Does every member of the marketing department need to be there or can the Director share the relevant information to their team members later? Peoples’ time is expensive and unless each participant is actively contributing in a meaningful and truly unique way, they may not need to be there. If you are inviting people strictly so their ego isn’t hurt by being “left out,” it’s time to have a conversation with those folks about where they are placing their value on your organizations’ activities. Having them sit in meetings as human paper weights is not a good way to avoid that conversation.
If you have a room full of people looking at a spreadsheet together for the first time, you just created the adult version of story time. Distribute any data or information 24 hours in advance and hold people accountable for being prepared to discuss the data. Not only can you shorten the length of the meeting, you can also increase the quality of the discussion as questions are raised, assumptions challenged or strategies debated.
This, of course, is not a complete list but they are the most common mistakes I have experienced and also the easiest to rectify. If your organization is willing to adapt these rules as standard practice, you may not reduce the number of meetings you have but you will spend less time in them and accomplish more in that time.