How to shorten and improve your online meetings
This Post is based on the ‘High-Performance Management’ model designed to help Managers move to a Transformational management style and build High-Performance Teams. It is based on 40 years of management consulting, improving the performance and productivity of IT and Business across the Insurance, Banking, Finance, Health, Transport, Retail, Superannuation and Technology sectors.
High-Performance Teams are successful because they love their work
Any team can achieve High-Performance
Here are some tips and ideas on how to shorten and improve your online meetings while working from home. These resulted from a recent survey I conducted on peoples experience of online meetings.
On-Line meetings can be time consuming, confusing and cumbersome to manage. The technology is not always that friendly and tends to fragment the way discussions are said and heard.
There is a solution, one that I have tested that shortens and improves the online meeting experience and leaves everyone feeling quite satisfied and happy afterwards.
Imagine your screen is a meeting room table with people seated from upper left to bottom right
Now, move through the following six steps
Preparation
In the meeting invite, make it clear as to who is Chairing the meeting.
Have any presentations or documents you are going to display tested and ready to go with a single click.
Sign-in a couple of minutes early and do not wait for late attendees.
Those who join late should feel a degree of embarrassment as joining late is not just disrespectful of others; it is unprofessional. (You can make the last person to join take the minutes.)
Open Agenda
Use an Open Agenda that is no formal Agenda at all.
Move around the table, starting with the first person in the upper left of the screen.
Now conduct a Discussion round with each person covering off all of their discussion points in the one go.
Now conduct a Questions round with each person asking all of their questions in the one go.
The reason for handling questions separately is that someone else's questions may be answered during the discussion round, so that’s less questions to be asked and answered.
Minutes.
Have the Chairperson or a nominated minute taker do the minutes as the meeting progresses. Aim to issue the minutes within 30 minutes of the meetings completion.
(If it is a High-Performance Meeting, then minutes of course are not required.)
Stand-up
To shorten say a one-hour meeting to 30 minutes, have everyone stand-up for the meeting. This improves concentration, listening and overall attention. You will get through the topics faster. Simply have everyone adjust their cameras to give an appropriate view.
Timebox it
Another very effective way to shorten the meeting is to Timebox it. Allocate a fixed amount of time for the meeting, say 45 minutes and make sure everyone can see a clock.
Summarize
Lastly the Chairperson negotiates the date and time of the next meeting, the next Chairperson and minute taker (who may be the last to join).
That’s all.
I have been using this approach for the last three weeks, using both standing up and timeboxing combined. Meeting times have been halved and my focus and memory retention of the discussions has noticeably improved. Everyone has commented that they felt a lot better after using this approach, all of a sudden the meetings have gone from being clinical and cumbersome to being more productive and quite enjoyable.