Effective meetings

The quest for the most effective meetings has produced helpful tips on setting expectations early, sending clear agendas ahead of time and briefing contributors. Bringing doughnuts was high up the list too – staff incentives, perhaps.

While arriving five minutes early, sticking to the topic, and sending timely minutes are excellent habits for individuals, the structures that foster good meeting practices are more interesting. For example, reducing the number of meetings, shortening the remaining ones, thus ensuring they are productive.

Meeting outcomes must be clear at the start. Not making sure of this is the fundamental mistake most people make according to Scott Shanks, project manager at IBM with 20 years’ experience running programmes for government and corporates globally. Once a goal is set, the meeting must stick to it.

Don’t invite too many people with loose connections to the topic, as this clogs up diaries and fills meetings with disengaged people checking emails.

“Ideally you want to try to remove every single meeting from your calendar, keeping the structured ones weekly, and the daily stand-up,” says Shanks. Stand-ups are meetings where all participants are standing and are meant to be short in length.

“Often clients spend all day in meetings, not seeing emails until the evening. It’s important to understand the financial impact of that,” explains Shanks. “As a programme lead, I make sure teams understand this costs money, and ask ‘do you really need to be having this meeting?’”

Running effective meetings means removing anything that blocks the stated goal. Structure is essential. Shanks operates a system with separate forums to resolve “blockers”, keeping them out of big meetings where they could distract from the goal.

The main features are:

In these 15-minute fixtures, team members state what they did the previous day, what they’re doing that day and anything blocking them. Those who work from home record their contributions on a collaboration tool (such as Shanks’s preference Slack) before 9:30am, and email traffic drops dramatically.

As programme manager, Shanks is most interested in helping staff remove the blockers, empowering them to resolve the issue. Describing the stand-ups, which come from agile methodology, as the best thing he’s put in place as a programme manager, he says: “If you’ve got 10 people and each of them emails you with a problem, there’s no chance you’re going to grasp the whole thing.

“So that daily stand-up is where you raise your issues.”

Covering specific issues, these don’t need formal agendas, but do need titles setting the topic and the desired outcome. They should be short. Shanks says: “If you get three or four people on an online meeting for half an hour, you’re guaranteed that some of them will be checking their mail or doing something else.”

Ideally, these meetings won’t exceed 15 minutes and last a maximum of 30, sending the strong signal that the purpose of this meeting is to ‘crack on’ with the issue.

Requiring more formal approaches, these are more expensive. They need structured agendas, a clear purpose and definite goals. Shanks keeps people on track by time; if one strand takes up too much time and has the possibility to delay things, he will assign it to another session.

He adds: “It’s not often that I don’t get what I want out of workshops, but if you try loading them up too much, then obviously you’re going to have problems.”

RAID – which stands for risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies – is a log that underpins the whole structure and crucially keeps sticking points out of meetings set up to focus on something else. In this context, risks are potential obstacles. Assumptions are things you expect to be in place to enable the work (such as staff, materials, skills and sufficient time). Issues are current obstacles or realised risks. Dependencies are the groups providing everything needed to prevent risks or resolve issues.

Dealing with these is extremely important to any goal, but can also derail meetings. When a sticking point threatens to dominate a meeting, the chair can call to move on quickly in the knowledge that it’s being monitored and dealt with in this way. Shanks keeps a comprehensive log of these and holds a weekly RAID meeting aimed at closing them off.

The log articulates items well, with a few sentences describing what each one is, how it occurred and what it affects.

Some of these blockers are dealt with in the daily stand-ups. Others, through more intensive attention, either with clear actions from programme managers, or convening a focused team for an ad hoc meeting. In more complex cases items may be escalated to the board or warrant a subproject of their own.

It’s not just the set-up of a meeting that you need to work on in order to keep it engaging. The human factor can also play a part. Tiredness, distractions and bewilderment can all obstruct progress in meetings. To tackle this, you need to do several things.

Keep people engaged. People must know why they are included in a meeting. If some attendees only need to engage with half the agenda, then structure the meeting to give them the option to leave. If a topic is not relevant to certain attendees, they may start checking emails on their phone, or working on their laptop, and this can have a contagious effect like a yawn, leaving a room full of drifting minds.

Rein in dominant characters. In meetings with clear goals, you must pull people back from tangents and keep on track. Timing and clear goals are essential. It’s important to keep things rolling so people stay focused.

Give people a chance to prepare. Prep material must come with a clear action. Simply sending it out 24 hours ahead of time is not always sufficient (although this is essential if you want people to engage, and sometimes a greater margin is necessary).

Shanks tells attendees exactly what they are expected to do with the material. They may need to approve something in the meeting, make a decision based on evidence in the pre-read, scrutinise a strategy, or offer solutions to a problem.

This is particularly tricky for senior people with limited time. One option is to hold a (short) pre-meeting to present the material and explain what they’re expected to do with it. Consider ways to prepare people to meet the goal of the main meeting.

Shanks’s approach creates more efficient and workable structures for meetings. It ensures everyone follows the same format together, rather than depending on individuals’ good meeting habits. He admits it has been developed over 20 years, and is always evolving.

Stepping back and using some of the features could save others time and money, generating better productivity and greater engagement in meetings.

Download PDF version:

• Business & Management magazine, Issue 267, September 2018 (pp.10-11)

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Further reading on how to run effective meetings is available through the resources below.