Take control of your meetings

Meetings are an extremely useful alignment tool. They’re communication machines that can help us solve or avoid entire suites of problems. But only under the right circumstances.

All meetings are expensive. The very minimum price is average employee hourly rate times amount of attendees plus some overhead for everyone’s context switch. The value we create in each meeting should be at least greater than that.

Who needs to be on this meeting?
Moderate the attendance.

This is the lowest-hanging fruit for saving resources in meetings. Simply don’t invite the folks who aren’t of any use in the meeting. Also exclude yourself from the meetings you’re not valuable at.

People may be a little suspicious and confused at first, but if you explain the reasoning, you can make the entire team more productive with this approach.

What are we trying to achieve during the meeting?

Moderate the direction.

Meetings are often sidetracked. People have various ideas, we dive into rabbit-holes, we talk about tangential stuff, and so on. Or we keep losing 30 minutes on Friday, because we booked a recurring meeting 5 months ago but no longer need it.

This is why we need an agenda and a person responsible we are staying aligned with it. This can be challenging, but is extremely valuable.

What do we do when the meeting is over?

Moderate the outcome.

Let’s assume we’ve had a productive meeting. This is great, but we still need to know what’s next. Are we having another meeting? Is someone supposed to do something? Who? And by when?

Ending a meeting with such unresolved questions is wasteful. We’ve already invested resources into this meeting, only to end up with a half-baked plan and a dead end. Make sure everyone knows what’s expected next.

Even if the next thing is another meeting.