Four easy ways to get rid of half of the meetings and usefully spend the rest.
Meetings can fill all available time, if not deal with them. We checked this by conducting a survey on the organization of the work of 1,400 office workers. 34% admitted that they attend more than 6 meetings per week.
What important decisions do they make in the end? Virtually none. 46% said that the majority of these meetings are devoted to a report on the current state of affairs and “rarely” or “never” do not end with a clear list of decisions on the issue. It turns out a waste of time, besides not included in the project plan. This means that participants in such meetings will have to either work overtime or postpone the deadline .
Having received the results of the survey, we thought about whether there are ways to deal with the irrational waste of time (in addition to the transition to Wrike , of course) and began to look for research on this. Conclusions to which we came under the cut.
Completely abandon all meetings on the current state of affairs.
Al Pittampalli, one of the leaders of Ernst & Young, recommends getting rid of absolutely all informative meetings and using team meetings only to develop a joint action plan. Meetings of the first type, popular 10–15 years ago, today are becoming an atavism with the advent of online collaboration tools. Now there are ways easier to stay up to date with the affairs of interest in real time. If you still need to summarize the work on a large project, try to give an overall picture of progress, and not focus on individual details. This will help such reports on the productivity of the team, the diagram of the combustion of tasks and other visualized reports that will help to compare the productivity of the team for long periods of time and draw conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the work processes.
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The meeting should not last more than an hour.
According to cognitive research , our brain's resources are limited, and when it is overloaded, people begin to make the wrong decisions. The time of maximum concentration of a person’s attention is about half an hour, and discussions longer than an hour become completely ineffective.
In order to follow this rule more precisely, you should always start and end a meeting on time, not waiting for those who are late for it and not extending the time if you did not have time to discuss the whole agenda. This motivates employees to come on time and be more precise.
A good approach to make meeting time more valuable is to change the duration of an event in the calendar from an hour to 30 minutes by default. Another interesting way to shorten the duration and discuss only the important things is to hold meetings while standing.
The meeting should have goals and concrete decisions on its completion.
Before planning the next meeting, a list of goals that participants want to achieve with its help is required. Perhaps it is at this stage that it will become clear that you can do without a meeting.
The organizer must ensure that participants adhere to the plan and the discussion ends with a list of specific solutions. These solutions can be immediately recorded in the form of tasks in the task tracker or the project management system used, assigned to specific performers, and monitored.
The less people the better
A large number of participants reduces the effectiveness of the meeting, therefore it is recommended that only key people be invited. Already mentioned, Al Pittampalli advises relying on self-regulation and allowing employees not to attend meetings that they see as unnecessary, without giving reasons.
But those who did come to the meeting should spend this time with the utmost involvement. You can prohibit the use of computers and phones, as well as engage in other things, so as not to reduce the level of attention. It is worth asking each of the participants to personally speak - whether it is a speech, a suggestion or questions to their colleagues, and make sure that all participants have the opportunity to participate equally in the discussion, and no one would draw all the attention to themselves. On the other hand, if a staff member at a meeting listens passively to others, this is a clear sign that he could spend this time more profitably outside the negotiation.
In conclusion, we can recall the long-time study of Microsoft, according to which at least a third of the working time is spent not on work and lead in this meeting list. So it can be assumed that almost every company has a lot of room to reduce their number and duration. If you have already thought about changing the approach to meetings, we would be grateful for the story about your experience in the comments.
What important decisions do they make in the end? Virtually none. 46% said that the majority of these meetings are devoted to a report on the current state of affairs and “rarely” or “never” do not end with a clear list of decisions on the issue. It turns out a waste of time, besides not included in the project plan. This means that participants in such meetings will have to either work overtime or postpone the deadline .
Having received the results of the survey, we thought about whether there are ways to deal with the irrational waste of time (in addition to the transition to Wrike , of course) and began to look for research on this. Conclusions to which we came under the cut.
Completely abandon all meetings on the current state of affairs.
Al Pittampalli, one of the leaders of Ernst & Young, recommends getting rid of absolutely all informative meetings and using team meetings only to develop a joint action plan. Meetings of the first type, popular 10–15 years ago, today are becoming an atavism with the advent of online collaboration tools. Now there are ways easier to stay up to date with the affairs of interest in real time. If you still need to summarize the work on a large project, try to give an overall picture of progress, and not focus on individual details. This will help such reports on the productivity of the team, the diagram of the combustion of tasks and other visualized reports that will help to compare the productivity of the team for long periods of time and draw conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the work processes.
')
The meeting should not last more than an hour.
According to cognitive research , our brain's resources are limited, and when it is overloaded, people begin to make the wrong decisions. The time of maximum concentration of a person’s attention is about half an hour, and discussions longer than an hour become completely ineffective.
In order to follow this rule more precisely, you should always start and end a meeting on time, not waiting for those who are late for it and not extending the time if you did not have time to discuss the whole agenda. This motivates employees to come on time and be more precise.
A good approach to make meeting time more valuable is to change the duration of an event in the calendar from an hour to 30 minutes by default. Another interesting way to shorten the duration and discuss only the important things is to hold meetings while standing.
The meeting should have goals and concrete decisions on its completion.
Before planning the next meeting, a list of goals that participants want to achieve with its help is required. Perhaps it is at this stage that it will become clear that you can do without a meeting.
The organizer must ensure that participants adhere to the plan and the discussion ends with a list of specific solutions. These solutions can be immediately recorded in the form of tasks in the task tracker or the project management system used, assigned to specific performers, and monitored.
The less people the better
A large number of participants reduces the effectiveness of the meeting, therefore it is recommended that only key people be invited. Already mentioned, Al Pittampalli advises relying on self-regulation and allowing employees not to attend meetings that they see as unnecessary, without giving reasons.
But those who did come to the meeting should spend this time with the utmost involvement. You can prohibit the use of computers and phones, as well as engage in other things, so as not to reduce the level of attention. It is worth asking each of the participants to personally speak - whether it is a speech, a suggestion or questions to their colleagues, and make sure that all participants have the opportunity to participate equally in the discussion, and no one would draw all the attention to themselves. On the other hand, if a staff member at a meeting listens passively to others, this is a clear sign that he could spend this time more profitably outside the negotiation.
In conclusion, we can recall the long-time study of Microsoft, according to which at least a third of the working time is spent not on work and lead in this meeting list. So it can be assumed that almost every company has a lot of room to reduce their number and duration. If you have already thought about changing the approach to meetings, we would be grateful for the story about your experience in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/302454/
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