Take it again, from the top

Your meeting culture is damaging the health of your organization

People get sloppy. We know that. How many of you have cleaned out a drawer and thought you’d keep it clean this time? You might even buy clever organizers to help, but at some point in the future it’s the same jumble of junk spilling out of those cute bamboo dividers.

The running shoes bought in a haze of good intention that now gather dust, the organizing app we never open. The list of well-meaning commitments that we fail to follow through on gets long.

Look at your calendar. How many hours every day are you and most of your team in meetings? When do you get your actual work done? On a scale of 1-10 how effective and necessary are the meetings, 1 being useless, 10 being essential?

My guess is you’re averaging about a 3.4.

My guess is that your meeting culture is a mess.

If our health suffers from eating too many ultra processed foods, our work cultures and effectiveness plummet when we have too many meetings we don’t need.

So, to review:

Good meetings

·      Good meetings start and end on time. If people aren’t there on time, start anyway.

·      They have an agenda, and they follow that agenda.

·      They have a reason that necessitates everyone in the room being there. Decisions to make, options to examine, information to report back, projects to build. A meeting is for tasks and discussions that cannot be accomplished effectively in an email chain, slack channel or shared document.

·      They are facilitated by a person who knows how to facilitate.

·      They end with next steps. Each next step has a person who is on the hook for delivering the next step.

·      Depending on the complexity of the meeting, someone is chosen to write up what we used to call a conference report – notes on the meeting and next steps sent out to the team.

Bad or unnecessary meetings:

·      People don’t show up on time, drift in, expect to be caught up when they show up late, run over past the end time, creating a domino effect of people showing up late to the next meeting.

·      Don’t have an agenda, deliverable, or clear outcome.

·      Are being used for the wrong reasons, to:

o   Build political clout

o   Pretend to be moving forward

o   Check and see if people are working

o   Avoid the difficult conversations like “why is this a meeting and not an email?”

·      The people in the meeting don’t all need to be there. It could be senior managers who are there as a CYA by a junior person, or because they are control freaks, or junior people who get pouty when they are left out.

·      Are held just because we’ve always done it this way. Every regular meeting should be interrogated once a quarter. Do we need this meeting, with these people, this often, done in this way? If not, change it.

·      The leader or meeting organizer is an extrovert and likes to hang out and work in a group. This is especially damaging for people, like me, who are introverts and work more effectively on their own, and prefer to return to a group once the deliverables are complete rather than making content or work product in a scrum in a conference room.

How to fix it and keep it fixed

Lots of organizations established some guidelines for meeting and working remotely during the pandemic. But now that we’re sort of back, sort of not, people are getting sloppy. The hybrid workplaces or part time return to office mandates mean there is still lots of time on video calls. And it’s not going well. Here are ways to fix your meetings.

Talk about it.

Have a group agreements session with everyone about your organization’s meeting culture. Leadership should start with some guidelines or mandatories, depending on the business. All client calls need cameras on might be a reasonable guideline for a client services organization. There needs to be a compelling business reason that makes sense to most, it can’t just be “because I said so.”

Skillful leaders will leave some space for co-creation. Decide, as a group, how to navigate any gray areas. Come up with terms of art, leave some flexibility, and be consistent in enforcement. Even in person meetings can devolve when everyone has their laptops open anis multitasking throughout a meeting.

Start here:

·      What is our current meeting culture and is it working?

·      What would you like it to change?

·      How do we articulate these guidelines concisely and keep them top of mind?

·      Who is the Meeting Cop? This will usually be someone in leadership who will make sure that the group agreements are observed. If no executive takes ownership for this it will be hard to move forward.

There is flexibility. Some organizations bring dogs to work and love seeing pets on video calls. Others are done with hearing barking in the background or seeing yet another feline butt. You all decide.

Name it

Admit that there are different levels of attention needed in meetings. Name them. I used to lead a boring but necessary team review of budgets every month. It was a big group, and a long meeting and people needed to be there to answer questions and take me through their run rates. But I didn’t need their full attention, so everyone had their laptop out, working on emails, until it was their turn, or they were asked a question.

Try the framework of colors as a term of art of reference point – you can use any term you like. My budget meetings were Green meetings. Green meetings are meetings where we can all acknowledge that the business of the meeting can happen with a minimum of attention.

Yellow meetings might be run of the mill, but to work effectively people need to pay attention. You all can decide if you need cameras on, some cameras on, not (obviously) multi-tasking or laptops down. This meeting requires more attention, or the performance of attention.

The Orange meetings are the important ones where everyone needs to be fully focused. This is a talk with HR, or building a complex proposal. What are your group agreements where you are asking for maximum focus? No screens aside from the one you may be looking into?

Own it

If you are in leadership and your organization’s meeting culture is terrible, that is on you. You can fix it and keep it fixed. If you don’t want to, or feel you lack the capacity to do it, then own that. But in my mind, that’s as irresponsible as saying you don’t really need to keep up on the P&L or make sure payroll gets delivered. Bad meetings, wall to wall gatherings that are unnecessary or disorganized are time sucks, which too many of us have gotten used to – to our detriment. It will leach out our productivity, morale and ability to get things done.