Continuing the theme of meetings, here’s a great list of suggestions from Seth Godin’s March 27, 2009 blog post, “Getting serious about your meeting problem.” :

• Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
• Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.
• Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don’t, kick them out.
• Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I’m serious.
• If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.
• Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you’re done. Not your fault, it’s the timer’s.
• The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.
• Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.
• If you’re not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.
• This is all marketing. It’s a show, one that lets your team know you’re treating meetings differently now.

Seth provides some provocative and creative ways to improve meeting effectiveness. Increased meeting effectiveness will ripple through your team, department, or organization to a higher performance culture. Agree on meeting ground rules with your team and follow them through.

For a large selection of past blogs, The Leader Letter items, and articles with my research, application ideas, and ways to improve meetings type “meetings” in our site search box at https://www.clemmergroup.com/site_map/search.php.