Meetings are critical. Critical for success or a critical obstacle, well, that depends.
Everyone has something to say about meetings. They are essential parts of team workflows but can quickly tip from “helpful, insightful with actionable takeaways” to “I have more important things to do”. The trouble comes when an overabundance of meetings leads to more stressful deadlines. If you have a lot of solo work and have a lot of meetings spread throughout the day, it becomes very difficult to focus and complete your tasks.
Why are Meetings so Important?
Meetings offer time for teams to sync up. Modern communication tools are fantastic, allowing people to work from anywhere and communicate at any time of the day. That being said, none of them replace the power of meetings.
Meetings are a great way to solve blockers. Goals change, and spending too much time working in a vacuum leads to ever-increasing risks that the work you do is no longer aligned.
So, meetings help keep teams synced up, working towards the same goal, and, especially when working remotely, a time to see your coworkers. This all sounds good, but meetings do take you out of the workflow you’ve established during the course of the day. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Almost no one works fully focused from the moment they clock into the end of the day. That herculean effort should not be expected of you, leaving time in your day for meetings and other distractions.
What Makes Meetings a Drag
Think about the last meeting you’ve had. At its conclusion, did you jump right back into your current project, or was there a little downtime before you got back into a productive workflow? If you dove right back in, then heck yeah. That’s awesome. You’ve evaded the phenomenon of meeting recovery, a concept explored in a recent study as the time it takes to “recover” from a meeting.
So, the next time you come out of hours of back-to-back meetings, make sure to give yourself some time to recover. Steeling your will and jumping right into work heightens the risk of burnout, rendering even the strongest workers helpless to go any further.
Meetings can get in the way of solo focus time. An abundance of meetings slice up the workday so much that it is hard to sit down for extended solo work sessions. This is stressful, especially when your current project has a lot of solo milestones.
This feeling is compounded when it doesn’t seem like they need to be at these meetings, anyway. Sitting, in-person or remote, in what feels like an unnecessary meeting will make that participant pay less attention, thinking about their own work, and count the seconds until they can get back to it. This happens when employees feel like they can’t say no to a meeting invite, even if they have a perfectly good reason.
How to Improve Meetings for Your Team
There is no panacea for meeting improvement. Alas! Perfecting meetings for your team requires a custom solution that takes into account all the unique variables that make your team or your business its own. There are many potential ways to better the meeting culture in your company, but without spending the time to figure out what works best, you may implement great solutions to nonexistent problems. For instance, you can try:
Prioritize Planning—Make use of the 40-20-40 rule, spending more time preparing for the meeting and executing meeting takeaways.
Small Meetings—Meetings are expensive! Every person adds to the meeting’s cost. Choose your participants carefully, and separate necessary and optional meeting participants.
**Office Hours—**Non-mandatory meetings at a specific time for people to meet if they need to. This lets people meet in a flexible environment where team members can talk in advance about meeting topics and ping key individuals to join.
Defined Meeting Agendas—Straying from the task at hand extends meetings longer with no additional benefit.
There is no one-size-fits-all treatment for bettering the meeting culture in your company. At En Dash, we specialize in providing solutions to your company’s problems. Whether you require a custom software solution or just some consulting expertise, feel free to reach out so we can help you take the first step in the right direction.
