How to plan meetings that people will want to attend

Last Christmas a friend of mine gave me a notebook which was titled Notes From Another Meeting That Should Have Been An Email.

The friend obviously knows me well. Over a long and successful career, I’ve developed a healthy and quite vocal dislike and mistrust of meetings that I’m invited to at work.

That’s not because I’m unwilling to be part of an information-sharing process. Anyone who’s a regular reader of these blogs will know, for example, that I’m a big advocate of ensuring communication is regular, open and transparent.

It’s not even a dislike of the concept of business meetings. Run well, a meeting can be the simplest and most effective way of ensuring ideas are shared, progress is monitored, and deadlines are met.

And therein lies the problem: good things happen when a meeting is well-run. But the fact is that the vast majority of meetings are the polar opposite of being well-run. Usually they are interminable affairs that drag on so long they begin growing whiskers – often without achieving any of the outcomes they were created to deliver.

How often have you sat in a meeting wondering why you’re there?

Or looking at a 10-item agenda with 5 minutes of the scheduled time remaining and realising not only that you’ve only covered the first 4 items, but also that the meeting will now overrun well beyond the time allocated.

The post-pandemic era of hybrid working has, if anything, made things worse rather than better. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has joined a meeting 20 minutes late with the words, “Sorry, my previous meeting overran …”.

Only last week I spent 45 minutes on a ‘meeting’ during which I spent nearly 15 minutes watching a senior leader in the business I was working with filling in a spreadsheet (a spreadsheet, by the way, that he wasn’t sharing on his screen – a double meeting whammy if ever there was one!).

Meetings take up a lot of our time, and the scale of agenda deficiency, lack of attention, and a general inability to complete tasks are the primary reasons why most of us are inclined to let out an audible groan when a calendar invitation lands in our inboxes.

The prevalence of poorly managed meetings has a number of negative effects, not least in creating a level of hostility that makes us enter the meeting room (virtually or otherwise) waiting for the facilitator to prove the whole thing was necessary in the first place.

Yet if you asked the person running the meetings you attend to assess their own ability as a facilitator, the chances are they would consider themselves quite skilled in making them effective.

Which begs the question of whether it’s just a few bad meeting apples spoiling it for everyone, or whether we’re just not as good at running meetings as we think we are.

So, just how do you organise meetings that achieve their intended outcomes and translate into a worthwhile experience for everyone involved? Because if you can do that, you’ll also see productivity and performance improve.

And we all know that when those two things are optimised, good things happen on the bottom line.

One idea is to survey all your meeting participants anonymously. This isn’t a bad idea in principle, but as any HR professional worth their salt will tell you, employees hate filling in feedback forms almost as much as they hate attending meetings.

I’ve yet to find a better approach to meeting management than the PEEPS model. PEEPS stands for Purpose, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Participation and Secondary Effects. Let’s look at this model in a bit more detail:

Purpose: Make sure you understand the need for the meeting before you even consider scheduling one. Think about what result would demonstrate that this meeting was a productive use of others’ time. Is it to reach a collective decision? Win support from those involved? Provide clarity around a challenging issue? Generate ideas and solutions? Increase team trust? Or something else?

Determine the major objectives for the meeting and make sure they guide the who, what, when, and how of the gathering.

Effectiveness: Your agenda should be the first thing you consider. Don’t give updates during meetings (those really are for email, most of the time). Instead, identify the top three results you want to achieve and create an agenda around those.

If your meetings result in positive outcomes and actions, more people will schedule time to attend them. A concise agenda and bullet points are your best friends, and to ensure no one claims they were unaware of what to expect, always provide the meeting agenda in the invitation. You should also ask attendees to email you their AOB items so you can manage them in a way that stops them from clogging up the meeting.

Efficiency: Invite only those who are required to produce the desired results. Others could be invited to dial in on silent if they’d like to attend so they can learn how decisions are made without slowing down the process.

Aim for the shortest meeting duration possible that still allows you to achieve your aims. A good trick is to consider ending meetings at 25 or 55 minutes past the hour to keep everyone focused while also giving them enough time to get to their next commitment.

Finally, ensure you end every meeting on time or early. People should have faith that you will only demand their attention when it is truly necessary.

Participation: You must make sure that everyone participates in the discussion, whether the meeting is held in person or by video. If someone looks like they’re becoming disengaged, ask them a question that's simple to answer, saying their name and giving them a chance to ‘come back to the room’.

The idea here is to convey the message that participation is expected of them but to do it in a way that doesn’t focus negatively on them. People will arrive better prepared and interested when they understand that your meetings are interactive and that their input matters.

Secondary effects: Any meeting's objective is never the meeting itself. It always comes down to what people do following the meeting. Manage your meetings so you can monitor the secondary impact and ensure participants have a real impact on how work is completed.

Finish meetings with a clear plan for the future: send a recap at the end of the same day, along with any choices and next actions. During the following meeting, you should follow up on the action items as well.

Dare to be the leader who stands out in a sea of time-wasting meetings that drain your soul. Take control of the meetings you are leading to ensure the success of both you and your attendees.

If you’d like to know more about how Constantia Consulting can help you to deliver a better meeting experience, why not get in touch for an informal friendly chat?