Meeting productivity is by no means a challenge that is new to the post-Covid era. For decades, business leaders have sought to optimise meeting best practices to improve their productivity, while employees have bemoaned the effects of meeting fatigue.
For those of us who work in an office-based environment, meetings are a part of everyday life, accounting on average for 33% of our working week. Yet, according to research by Professor Steven G Rogelberg, only around 50% of our meeting time is effective – less when it comes to remote meetings. It’s in everybody’s interest, then, to improve the efficacy of the meetings we donate our time to, to ensure we all feel like we’re making a valuable contribution to the workplace, and to increase our overall satisfaction. Strategic use of technology can play a key role in this.
In this article we’ll take a look at some of the barriers to delivering effective meetings alongside some strategies for making them more productive. We’ll then examine hybrid meetings in particular and how we can optimise them to ensure that remote and in-person participants all get the most out of their time.
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- Improving meeting productivity
- Combining virtual and in-person meetings
- How can I make meetings more productive?
Improving Meeting Productivity
There are some practices that will always be considered optimal for delivering an effective meeting regardless of its format. In this section, we’ll explore some evergreen strategies that can be applied to all meetings.
Choosing the Right Facilitator
Having a suitable chair for your meeting can make the difference between a productive, collaborative meeting and one that more closely resembles an office-based melee. Meeting attendees take their cues from the chair, so a good facilitator will ensure they are prepared and have circulated an agenda for participants’ advanced consideration. They will be warm and welcoming, creating a light-hearted, relaxed atmosphere where participants feel comfortable to participate and that their contributions are valued. However, they will know when to be firm, move the conversation along, and respectfully challenge contributors. Most importantly, they will recognise themselves as guardians of other people’s time.
Being an effective chair is a very specific skill, and sometimes, having the humility to admit that you might not be the best person to lead a meeting can be the best decision you’ll make for a project. Company executives should always ensure that there are professional development opportunities available for those who want to learn to run better meetings, and it’s essential to recognise the value of formal training.
Meeting Length and Frequency
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s 2023 report, Productive meetings: An evidence review by J. Young and J. Gifford suggests that overly frequent meetings can lead to ineffectiveness and dissatisfaction. They conclude that it may be far more productive to hold longer meetings less frequently and that frequency has a greater impact on efficacy than meeting duration. That said, they do concede that some careful thought around meeting length can be a productive measure, and that reducing meeting lengths by 5-10% of what’s needed can help fuel productivity and keep everyone focussed and stimulated.
Questioning the Agenda
This is an effective strategy if you often find yourself coming out of a meeting having had plenty of fruitful discussions but unable to really determine what has been decided. Next time, take your meeting agenda and turn each agenda point into a question. This helps to keep everyone focussed throughout the meeting and makes it clear to all participants that the meeting can’t progress to the next agenda point until the previous question has been answered. When the meeting has concluded, you should have a clear list of decisions that have been made.
Combining Virtual and In-Person Meetings
Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the proliferation of remote and hybrid meetings has brought a new set of challenges to the boardroom table. In this section, we’ll look at some of the challenges that are unique to hybrid and remote meetings, and examine some strategies for improving their efficacy.
Equitable Meeting Experiences
Those of us who remember the precursor to hybrid meetings may recall conference calls, where remote participants would be dialled into an in-person meeting via a speaker system in the centre of the table. Cue repeated awkward moments as participants in the room forget the presence of remote participants, or as those dialling in struggle to interject themselves into the conversation without the aid of visual cues. This is where an interactive display helps to create a level playing field for all participants. When we are able to see remote participants, we are constantly reminded of their presence, and the meeting facilitator can bring them into the conversation, or they can offer a visual cue to demonstrate that they would like to make a contribution.
Similarly, using digital tools can help provide a consistent experience to in-person and remote meeting participants. When trying to solve a complex problem in a meeting, we might employ something like a card sorting or a mind mapping exercise to aid our comprehension, which have traditionally been challenging for remote attendees to participate in. The introduction of tools such as Miro and Figma allows us to move these activities into the digital space, where they are accessible to everyone, and all participants are able to contribute to an equal degree.
Social Loafing
Social loafing is a phenomenon whereby individuals contribute less effort in a group task than when working alone. The result is that an output of a group rarely equals the combined potential of each of the individual contributors, and researchers theorise that this is partly due to a lack of motivation, with individuals trusting other group members to do the work. Social loafing can be particularly prominent in remote or hybrid meetings, where the participants are able to adopt a greater sense of anonymity. This might be because they have reduced physical proximity to the other participants, because remote meetings can accommodate substantially more participants than in-person meetings, or simply because participants have the option to keep their cameras off.
To reduce social loafing and increase meeting productivity in remote and hybrid meetings, we recommend keeping meeting numbers as low as possible and encouraging participants to switch their cameras on if they feel comfortable doing so.
Cultural Context
The most effective remote meetings are planned with consideration for the cultural contexts of all involved. They make it easy for us to hold meetings across multiple time zones, but it’s important to choose a time that elicits optimal productivity from all participants. While we know that 10am-12pm is generally considered the best time for hosting decisive meetings, this might not be ideal if participants in other time zones are at the end of a long working day. More important though, is the cultural context from which our international participants are approaching meetings. In the English-speaking West, we tend to practice surface acting in meetings, meaning that we express our feelings inauthentically, while other Western nationalities can seem overly direct to our sensibilities. In many Middle Eastern cultures it’s deemed rude to jump straight into business without sufficient socialising beforehand. An effective chair will be aware of this and will know how to make meetings more productive for all involved, regardless of cultural background.
Protecting Your Time
Technological advancements over the past 15 years have certainly made it easier to facilitate collaborative working. Now, with just a few clicks, you can be in an interactive meeting with 25 other participants without having to sit in traffic for an hour. A couple more clicks later, and you’re in the next one. It’s becoming increasingly easy to squeeze more and more meetings into a day, yet virtual meetings inspire their own kind of fatigue. Our brains have to work harder to fill in missing information that might previously have been conveyed by gesture, while research has shown that having a camera on for long periods of time can engender mental exhaustion, particularly among women. This is all before we even consider that much of the workforce achieves job satisfaction not through sitting in meetings, but in the work they produce outside of those meetings. Sometimes the best thing you can do to make meetings more productive, is to know when to decline them so that you can focus your energy optimally.
How can I Make Meetings More Productive?
To find out how Promethean’s technological business solutions can help you to make meetings more productive, request a free demo of our ActivPanel and complementary technologies.
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