Did you know that managers spend two days per week in meetings on average?  That represents 15 years of our working lives. While enduring our current lockdown, it is tempting to believe our meeting pain is explained by excessive screen time. I coach several leaders each week and have been witness to some serious cases of  “Zoom or Microsoft Teams fatigue”.   While screen time overload certainly plays a role in current meeting fatigue, it is not the central culprit, and we need to face the monster - which exists in virtual and in-person meetings.

From my experience, here are a few questions to ask yourself to diagnose your meetings: How do you experience the problem of unproductive meetings? Do controversial topics magically slip under the rug while the subject gets changed? Is there silence when a tough question is asked?  Do people pretend to agree in the meeting, only to sabotage “agreements” later that they do not agree with? Are decisions revisited without new data, just because the disagreement was not aired the first time? For “consensus” or “buy-in” to occur, must everyone agree? When a decision is made in the meeting, are barriers to implementation ignored or left undiscussed?  

It’s tempting to assume that the moment our meetings are taking place back around the conference room table, face to face (F2F), all will be well again.  While I miss the F2F contact as much as anyone, now is the time to admit that our widespread meeting dysfunction is not just because they are happening virtually - ineffective meetings are a major issue for people and organizations unrelated to the physical/virtual space they take place in. While virtual meetings and remote work in general bring with them unique challenges, virtual meetings are getting a bad rap, it’s likely not the virtual part that’s the problem, but the ineffective meeting culture in the first place is the root cause that deserves to be addressed.   

I am certain I do not need to fully describe the problem when meetings are generously described as tedious, a waste of time, unproductive, or when people talk in the hallways saying ‘that meeting could have been an email.’ In business, meetings are used by management to make decisions and move the organization forward. They form an essential element of HOW we get stuff done together - and yet we generally seem resigned to accepting boring, unproductive, time-wasting meetings as  “necessary evils” as people continue to harbor a sad belief that there are no alternatives.   

My Top 3 Meeting Remedy Resources:

Should a brave team member elect to take on this challenge, I am curating my three go-to sources of best practice guidance on productive meetings; your job is to determine what you can bravely recommend and experiment with in your work environment.

1. Hall & Hall on Getting the Right Topics on the Table and the Right People in the Room

Authors Kevan & Alan Hall are UK consultants with over 20 years of experience helping global clients deal with effective collaboration and decision making. In their book, Kill Bad Meetings they boil it down to starting with two basics: elimination of unnecessary topics… and, wait for it, cutting unnecessary participants, the tougher challenge.

Especially for rapidly scaling organizations, accustomed to inviting and keeping “everyone” in the loop, or in the room, this can be a difficult task to confront. The more people, the less productive a meeting - unless the purpose is strictly to disseminate one-way information.    The issue is not about how much someone participates.  After all, we all know people who speak up - a lot - and add little value.  On the other hand, there are some participants who are deeper thinkers, speak up only occasionally yet deliver great value. Hall and Hall provide a practical roadmap for analyzing and making the case for a deeper analysis and approach.

2. Lencioni on More Drama and More Structure

Patrick Lencioni’s powerful meeting theory is that painful meetings are the result of two completely separate problems, no drama and no structure: first, meetings are wildly boring.  Aptly described in a leadership fable in the book Death by Meeting, Lencioni tells us that we need to excise boredom and welcome more drama - conflict - disagreement, and the controversial debate of ideas into our meetings. Interestingly, there’s a critical and powerful side effect to this - while the focus seems on making the meeting interesting, paying attention to fixing meetings this way generates far more than an interesting meeting.  A healthy debate of perspectives is the only way to make better decisions - isn’t that management’s raison d’etre?. Constructive conflict, where members of a team feel safe to speak up and share opposing views also happens to be the key to building team trust.  It is not accidental that Lencioni is also the author of the seminal book on building team trust: The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team.  Furthermore, this type of climate where employees and managers are comfortable expressing themselves candidly, are able to share opinions and concerns without fear of embarrassment, ridicule, or retribution is at the heart of a healthy culture - a high-performance work environment, or what Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety, in her book The Fearless Organization.  What does a climate which encourages a continuous flow of new ideas, solutions and critical thought drive?  Yes, innovation. So, let’s tally up the benefits: more interesting meetings, more time to work outside of meetings, more trust among teams, higher decision quality, and optimizing innovation - are you convinced to address this painful issue?

Lencioni’s guidance on structure is equally important, if somewhat more obvious. Meeting planners typically assume meeting structure is about agenda, time management and recording of minutes. Actually, it is far more about separating types of meetings and topics into different time slots, i.e. grouping daily and weekly tactical, and broader perspective monthly and quarterly strategic topics into separate meetings.  We have all been victims of what Lencioni calls  “meeting stew”, the most common regularly occurring meeting where all agenda topics receive roughly equal attention, without sufficient assessment of putting more important subjects early in the meeting, or parking them for an altogether different type of meeting.  Perhaps the most annoying experience in this meeting “stew” is the arrival of a super interesting agenda item in the last 10 min of the meeting, starved for discussion, impossible to dive into, let alone resolve. Do you recognize your staff meeting?

Introducing Lencioni’s levels of structure by creating multiple meetings, each with a different purpose, may sound overwhelming, so start where you can.  Here is an example introducing structure which did wonders almost overnight. A manager I am coaching has a new boss, the CTO.  The meeting culture has shifted dramatically in a few weeks after the new leader asked 2 questions repeatedly at the start of meetings he began to attend.  “What is this meeting for?” and “What decision am I/are we making?”  The number of meetings dropped by 40% in a couple of weeks - with more, not less, productivity. How is that possible? Not having to prepare mind-numbing large slide decks before the meeting - which did not drive decisions - has provided tremendous relief and given back time to several meeting participants.

3. So What About Virtual Meetings?

Of course virtual meetings require additional guidance as they do pose additional challenges, primarily with respect to engagement and participation. This subject has been written about extensively in recent weeks, but one excellent set of techniques to address these and more have been consolidated by remote work expert, Wayne Turmel, in his quick read Meet like you mean it: a leader’s guide to painless and productive virtual meetings. 

So, will you accept the challenge of improving meeting effectiveness?  Can you turn this around and make this a priority?  The return on investment is clear - it starts with reclaiming approximately one day a week back for other important work.  In addition, interesting meetings create the conditions for collaboration, teamwork, decision quality and innovation, all interrelated to dramatically increasing productivity. Virtual or not, unlocking the power of productive meetings can have a dramatic return on you, your team, and your organization.