More on Meetings

Introduction

No one wishes to have more meetings. Generally meetings are regarded as a necessary nuisance.

However, many studies show that meetings are important to job satisfaction. Thus it is critical that time dedicated to meetings is well spent.

The best meetings are used for discussion, debate and decision making, rather than information sharing and updates.

Some reasons most meetings are inefficient include:

- no, or very loose, agenda (this can result in the meeting meandering around)

- no prioritising of topics for discussion (this results in certain topics being discussed to the exclusion of others; too much time spent on unimportant issues, etc)

- talented talkers and extroverts will tend to dominate (they will try to bias people to their ideas, etc; dominate proceedings)

Some ways to handle these problems include

- only discuss items in the prepared agenda and allocate time to each agenda item (if not in the agenda and/or not urgent, it is recorded as an item for the next meeting)

- background papers to be delivered several days before the meeting (this allows time for people to think and digest information beforehand rather than wasting time reading it during the meeting, etc)

- allocate everybody a predetermined amount of time to talk on all topics (furthermore, if someone
"...wants to contribute during a team meeting, they must have read and commented on the documents beforehand..."
Amantha Imber, 2022

These documented comments are circulated days before the meeting.

NB we can read faster than we speak

- set a time limit on discussions as part of the agenda (if consensus not reached within a set time, perhaps 5 minutes, then the conversation stops and a decision maker is selected).