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Why The Business Meeting Must Evolve – Or Go Extinct

Why The Business Meeting Must Evolve – Or Go Extinct

Meetings have played an important role in business as far back as 600 BCE, when many Greek cities housed an agora. The term agora comes from ageírein, which means to gather together.

Whether they’re held on Zoom or in the conference room, today’s business meetings have little resemblance to the bustling public spaces of ancient Greece, where vital information was exchanged among neighbors, and merchants gathered for a singular sales opportunity. Though we now have copious technology for sharing vital information asynchronously and sharing team updates, meetings have remained so integrated into our business landscape that we don’t even question them. They just show up on our calendars, and then we show up to them. For many of us, meetings are almost synonymous with work.

Three consultants from Bain concluded that just one weekly executive meeting ate up 300,000 workload hours a year, according to the study, in Harvard Business Review. That’s a big investment. How much value did the company eke out of those hours?

In addition to being a time sink, these regular get-togethers are stress inducers. According to Zippia, “At least 65% of employees agree that meetings prevent them from completing their own work, and 45% of employees feel overwhelmed by the number of meetings they attend.”

Surely they’re not that bad. Don’t some meetings contribute to productivity, efficiency and innovation, creating a positive experience for employees? More and more people think “no.” In fact, in a bold move Shopify decided to cancel their meetings altogether “in order to become a better operating company,” according to their COO, Kaz Nejatian.

But do we need to take such a drastic action? Is there a way to increase the reward-to-repulse ratio of meetings? Before we commit to banishing them from the workplace entirely, let’s look at some of the benefits of meetings.

Meetings are social. And we need more social in the workplace. Since the pandemic, there has been a humanity deficit at work. Loneliness has increased.

Meetings foster human interaction. They create connection and bolster team cohesion, essential to establishing solid, productive relationships. And relationships are the currency of business.

Meetings support innovation. Brainstorming and some forms of problem solving are best done in settings where people can play off each other and interact. Research shows that collaborative problem-solving leads to better outcomes.

Meetings provide opportunities to build your personal brand. After all, many of the people you seek to impact and influence are all in one place (even if that place is a Zoom room). Meetings provide a platform for showcasing your expertise and demonstrating your leadership and relationship building skills.

What if instead of abolishing meetings, we redefined them? What if we made them more potent in their humanity, while making them less-time consuming and frustrating? To do this, we need to dissect the meeting into its parts. Any elements that don’t require the entire participant list to interact should be conducted using asynchronous communication tools like email, Slack, text or even a quick video.

Let’s use a project update meeting as an example and identify the parts that will deliver the highest rewards and the least repulsion.

Introductions. This gets a yes! Although everyone can read each other’s LinkedIn profiles outside of a meeting, introductions provide bonding, especially in person (if possible) synchronously and especially if participants are sharing a tidbit about themselves that paints a fully human picture. Even if all participants know each other, it’s a valuable activity that helps to reinforce relationships.

Agenda. This gets a nope. Agendas can and should be sent in advance. There’s no reason to take everyone’s time going over the agenda. Participants can review it when it’s convenient for them before coming to the meeting.

Minutes. Nope. This review of what happened during the last meeting can be sent to participants beforehand, along with the agenda.

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Project status updates. Nope. These, too, can be prepared by each team member in advance and distributed to all participants asynchronously. What’s more, the “boring” needs to be nixed in these updates; they can be delivered as videos or infographics or whatever makes sense for the content that needs to be communicated and consumed.

Discussion. Maybe. For topics where most participants have something to contribute or learn, and the discussion will lead to solving problems or moving the project forward, this should be done in the meeting, with an organized leader or facilitator who is skilled at making sure the “train of thought” doesn’t get derailed. But for items where only a subset of those on the participant list need be involved—including brainstorming sessions and tackling unexpected challenges that have arisen—the appropriate parties should decide how and when to connect in their own, much smaller meeting (if they even think a meeting is the best approach).

Feedback. Yes! Especially for the subjective components, where multiple opinions are helpful. This gives everyone a chance to be heard and provides an opportunity for acknowledgement and constructive feedback that will help keep the project team heading in a positive direction. But the most efficient feedback sessions will be preceded by online polling of all participants so that the meeting time will not be spent debating aspects that everyone is actually already in agreement about.

Action items and follow-up. Maybe. Meetings can be useful for deciding which people and which teams will be responsible for executing specific elements of a project, but the follow-up should happen after the meeting in one-on-one sessions between managers and their team leaders.

When meetings are delivered with this leaner approach, the time commitment associated with the synchronous elements can be reduced. Some “meetings” can be shortened to 15 or 20 minutes, especially if your people can get used to a faster input style that requires everyone to be highly focused, with time limits when they are sharing out loud. Offloading unnecessary components will reduce the feeling of overload when it comes to meetings.

Despite Shopify’s experiment, meetings are not likely to go away altogether. But hopefully the badly managed ones will go away, replaced by a more productive, less frustrating experience that aligns with today’s digital business environment and weary workforce.

Forbes

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