Meetings are important. They are the yellow brick road to achievement; vital to company success. We need them. However, I think we can all agree that a good chunk of the meetings on our calendar is time-wasters and highly frustrating. One-third of the 11 million meetings that take place in the U.S. daily are unproductive, according to Business Insider. That translates to an estimated annual loss of $37 billion in unproductive meetings. That is insanity; insanity that can be prevented.

Significantly, it does feel like there is a change happening in corporate culture today; teams are starting to focus more on how to approach meetings in a new way to save time, provide more time for heads-down work, and improve morale. It’s important to recognize that when meetings are done right, they can take your business to the next level.

What does this look like? Doing the work in the meetings, not after. This is one of our meeting mantras at Voltage Control. It redefines the common perception of meetings altogether. Instead of actionless discussions, we view meetings as collaborative group work sessions, where there is a clear purpose, inclusivity, high engagement, productivity, and tangible outcomes.

Too many meetings are spent talking about what needs to be done instead of actually doing it.

If you’ve noticed that your team or organization has fallen into bad meeting habits, here are tips to have more effective meetings.

Run Effective Meetings

1. Identify a clear purpose 

You must have an identified, tangible purpose to call your team together if you want it to be productive, something to work toward.

Last year at Control the Room, a summit we host for facilitators, the master facilitator Priya Parker spoke on the “Art of Gathering.” One of the many things I love about what she says in her book is how, before you plan anything, you have to dig deep to identify the real purpose of your meeting. Priya feels that when you have a good purpose for your gathering, it helps you make better decisions. Your purpose is your “bouncer.” It lets you know what is right and wrong for your particular event.

Next time you are planning a meeting, take more time to think about the purpose of your gathering and use that clear purpose to set your agenda, plan your activities, and outline your attendees.

2. Create an effective agenda 

When you’ve decided to hold a meeting, you need to outline your activities. 

Preparation is key to running a successful meeting. Once you have identified your meeting objective, create and share a meeting agenda of what needs to be discussed to achieve that goal. A meeting agenda serves as an outline of the essential topics to address. What will be talked through with your team and for how long? Intentionally construct the agenda–include only what is crucial and pertains to the objective–then send it to all attendees ahead of time so they know what to expect and are on the same page. Once you’re in the meeting, stick to the schedule. Respect everyone’s time; stay on track.

3. Hold a longer meeting 

While we’re all trying to cut down on our daily meetings, there may be moments when more in-depth conversations are needed, and longer meetings are necessary. In the Harvard Business Review article “A Step-by-Step Guide to Structuring Better Meetings” author Liane Davey talks about the power of what she calls strategic directions meetings: “Between two and six times per year, your leadership team needs to lift your eyes to the horizon and re-evaluate your strategy. This should be a lengthy meeting that provides ample time to meander.

So, while you’re taking the time to focus your day-to-day meetings (and getting rid of as many as you can!), don’t forget to schedule extra time for the big meetings that need to happen.

4. Bring a prototype 

Another one of our meeting mantras is “no prototype, no meeting.” That means if there is not a clear and tangible “prototype” or idea to flush out and explore, then there is no reason to have a meeting in the first place. If you want to jump-start your meeting and make it more engaging and useful, start bringing a prototype to your session.

“The reason for prototyping is experimentation — the act of creating forces you to ask questions and make choices. It also gives you something you can show to and talk about with other people.” — Tom and David Kelley

A prototype can take many forms. Some examples are a storyboard, mood board, written brief, sample pitch of an idea, or coding. The structure of a prototype sets your team up to do the work in the meeting. Your team is able to discuss it and collectively work on it DURING the meeting instead of saving the to-dos for when people return to their own work zones. 

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5. Debrief 

Allot time at the end of the meeting to debrief with the group. Remind team members of the major takeaways to help with retention and successfully transition them to pursue next steps. Summarize the discussed topics, obtained information, and the decisions or insights reached. Then, divvy out the tasks that need to be done to bring the discussed idea(s) to life, including when they must be completed by, and by whom. This is also part of doing the work in the meeting. Assign tasks to appropriate parties, communicate clear deadlines, then release everyone to tackle their responsibilities.

Good Meetings Require Good Facilitators

If your meetings lack organization, participant engagement, and diverse outcomes, expert facilitation can help. Here’s the thing: technically, anyone who runs a meeting–whether good or bad–is a facilitator. If you’re running a meeting, you’re facilitating. So how do you ensure you are facilitating meetings effectively?

A facilitator’s job is to actively guide teams through the decision-making process to reach goals and desired outcomes. They are unbiased leaders removed from emotion about office politics, which allows them to objectively lead with a clear vision of the sought-after goal. Their purpose is to ensure that a team meets its objectives, has fruitful conversations, and that the group gets what they need and want from the gathering. A good facilitator has the following qualities:

• Confidence: Able to control the room and keep participants interested and engaged.
• Humility: Knows the meeting is not about them and relishes that fact.
• Flexibility: Comfortable course-correcting during the meeting if things change, participants need something different, or the agenda needs to be amended on the fly.
• Curiosity: Interested in their team’s/client’s problems, insight, and challenges and is excited to learn more about them.

Facilitation is an art. Therefore, it is a continuous practice. That’s why we host a free weekly community facilitation practice at our Facilitation Lab, which is focused on helping facilitators hone their craft to help improve the quality of meetings. Join us to practice your facilitation approach, learn new skills, and connect with and learn from fellow facilitators. Let’s all be our best as facilitators so we can help make meetings exceptional.

Still need help building a better meeting? Bring in a professional facilitator from Voltage Control.

Voltage Control designs and facilitates innovation training, Design Sprints, and design thinking workshops. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk.

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Nobody wants to attend a meeting that’s boring, poorly-planned, or stressful. The key to any successful meeting begins with preparation. If you start with a good plan, you have better odds of a successful and focused meeting that your attendees will feel good about.

In the Harvard Business Review article, “How to Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting,” Roger Schwarz, organizational psychologist, speaker, and leadership team consultant, explained how vital the agenda is: “An effective agenda sets clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during a meeting. It helps team members prepare, allocates time wisely, quickly gets everyone on the same topic, and identifies when the discussion is complete. If problems still occur during the meeting, a well-designed agenda increases the team’s ability to effectively and quickly address them.”

We’d love to share with you the recipe for writing constructive agendas so that you can start having effective meetings today.

Six Ways to Create More Effective Agendas

1. Set Clear Objectives

Before you begin to piece together a meeting agenda, you must first clearly identify the objective of the meeting. Make sure you can clearly articulate WHY you are having this meeting and WHAT you need to accomplish by the end. Make your focus even more finite and identify if the purpose of addressing the objective is to inform, seek input for a decision, or receive help in making a decision. The angle will determine how you structure your agenda, and therefore your meeting. 

We follow a set of meeting mantras at Voltage Control to keep us from wasting precious time and resources at scheduled gatherings. Take a few moments to get clear on the big goal of your meeting and the objectives you need to meet by the end of it.

2. Focus on Essential Topics

Once you identify the purpose, it is time to begin agenda construction. Rule one of facilitation club is to help the group communicate as effectively as possible. One way to help this is by eliminating any topics or talking points that do not coincide with the purpose of the meeting and the goal of trying to be reached. 

Clearly define the essential topics, with each serving as a segment of the meeting. Arrange them in order of importance or relevance to create a natural flow as the meeting unfolds.

3. Set a Realistic Schedule

A robust agenda helps facilitation run smoothly and produce successful results. Take your meeting outline and assign each segment a specific time slot. Go with your instinct. This is a skill that will improve over time. If you don’t set time boxes around your activities, you can bet that you won’t get to everything on your list. However, this doesn’t mean you’re inflexible. For example, if a meaningful conversation happens and takes up more time than expected, check-in with the group, acknowledge that you’re going over, and figure out where to shave-off time later in the agenda.

If you are planning a more extended meeting, be sure to build in ample time for breaks. Keep in mind that the ideal meeting length is no longer than 60 minutes. Build these breaks into your plan at times when you think energy will be waning.

Finalize the timing by naming a start time and end time, then stick to them. With up to 55 million meetings held each day, and employees averaging six hours per week attending them, one of the top reasons so many people dread meetings is the fear of it being too long or running past the end time, cutting into their own work time. 

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When you build a reputation of ending meetings at the scheduled time, attendees are more likely to develop trust and increased liking to attending, which will boost morale and help productivity. Finishing on time is respecting everyone else’s time.

4. Work Collaboratively

If you are scheduling a long meeting, you might want to call in help. Two heads are better than one. Find a partner who can help you build the agenda and meeting activities collaboratively. Having an agenda partner also helps you stay on track–do they see something you don’t? You can more easily identify any holes or issues with the agenda when you have a second set of eyes.

5. Reflection Time

One of the commonly overlooked aspects of an effective meeting agenda is not making time to debrief. It is imperative that you schedule in time to reflect on what was discussed and decided on in the meeting 

Establish post-meeting tasks to bring the decision made in the meeting to life and keep the forward momentum going. Set clear deadlines for when these tasks need to be completed before the meeting is adjourned so that everyone knows what is expected of them, and steady and timely progress can be made.

6. Write it down

Once you’ve gotten your agenda where you want it, you’ll need to put your schedule down in words. Send them the plan beforehand. Doing so allows everyone the opportunity to look it over and consider what will be discussed and prepare before they enter the meeting, which improves meeting quality and discussion. You could also take a bit more time and use a template like these here to create a more detailed and professional looking agenda

It is also beneficial to hand out a physical copy of the agenda or display it on a projector if in-person, or send it in an email or share it on Zoom if virtual, from the start of the meeting. A visual reference present throughout the session helps to keep the group on task.

A meeting is only as strong as its agenda.

Need help designing your next big meeting?

Voltage Control facilitates design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at hello@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

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The best meetings, remote or in person, have ground rules; a code of conduct that establishes expected behavior and standards for all attendees to meet. Virtual meeting ground rules must go beyond in-person expectations to be effective, as they need to accommodate for tech and the physical separation of attendees.

At this point, we’ve all had many months to become accustomed to meeting virtually. Some love it and some hate it, but either way, it seems that virtual meetings are here to stay – at least, they aren’t going anywhere any time soon. If your virtual meetings still aren’t going smoothly – perhaps they lack engagement or perhaps they’re a little chaotic – it may be time to go back to basics. Virtual meetings cannot be treated like in-person meetings put online. They are a different beast entirely and therefore demand an entirely new set of expectations. If you haven’t established ground rules for your remote team’s virtual meetings (or if your rules need an update), here’s how to get started.

Pro-tip: use our Virtual Work Guide to facilitate quality work with a distributed team.

Playing Your Part

Set your team up for success by introducing ground rules with enough notice to allow everyone to process and take the rules to heart. The advanced delivery of your agenda and any virtual tools that may be used is a perfect opportunity to introduce your ground rules. This will allow participants to visualize them in context with the upcoming meeting’s scheduled content.

It can be beneficial to explain why each rule exists; if participants understand why they are being asked to do something rather than feeling obligated to follow an arbitrary rule, they are more likely to cooperate. Explanations should be brief but give your team insight into the positive effect establishing the ground rule will have on the meeting.

Encourage your participants to speak with you privately if they feel they will be unable to follow a ground-rule. This is most likely to come up with matters of a technological nature; participants may have varying access to equipment or may have an issue with appearing on video. Approach these circumstances with understanding. Understand that virtual meetings often bring attendees inside each other’s homes and not everyone has the same level of comfortability with that. Participants may not have room in their home for a private working space, have small children that cannot be relied upon to remain appropriate in front of a camera, or experience a level of self-consciousness or distraction from appearing on camera that will interfere with their ability to remain focused.

Basic Ground Rules

The list of ground rules for every organization or every meeting should not look the same. They should be tailored to each team’s purpose and each organization’s individual work culture. There are, however, a few baseline rules that are highly likely to appear on most lists.

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1. Keep muted unless it is your turn to speak: In-person, the person speaking during a discussion is likely to flow back and forth between different people or around the entire room. When this happens virtually, it is nearly impossible to follow who is speaking and what is being said. Participants should keep their mics muted unless it is their turn to speak.
2. No multi-tasking, even if it’s quick: It is extremely tempting to check an email or send a slack message during a virtual meeting; participants are already on their computers, after all. Everyone must resist this urge. It is too easy for a quick look at one’s inbox to lead down a much more distracting path. Give the meeting your full attention.
3.  Know how to use tools: Participants must show up to the meeting having already learned how to use any virtual tools provided with the agenda. This may include making an account for some resources. It might also mean that participants need to connect to the meeting via a laptop, not a smartphone if the virtual tools are incompatible or difficult to use with a smartphone.
4. Turn on video (if you can): Virtual meetings see better connection and engagement if participants appear on video rather than just audio. If participants are able to turn the video on, it is best that they do.

Additional Ground Rules

After you’ve created a list of basic rules, it may be time to add some additional ground rules tailored to your team or organization’s company culture. You may see the best results in terms of both quality and participant compliance if you allow your participants to create these ground rules with you. If you have reoccurring virtual meetings with your team, one of these meetings could be a good time to establish tailored ground rules together. If this is not possible, consider allowing suggestions via Google Form, email, Slack, etc.

Here are some questions to consider or to pose to your participants that will help in establishing ground rules that are a good cultural fit for the team.

• What time frames should we be available for meetings? What time frames should be off-limits?
•  How should we handle unforeseen distractions or unexpected issues that need to be attended to during a virtual meeting? How do we signal to others that we must step away without causing a disturbance?
• How far in advance do we need to know about pre-meeting prep work such as testing a new virtual tool?
• How long are we comfortable being in a virtual meeting? How often do we need stretch breaks?
• What method of communication should we use to communicate technical difficulties should they arise?

Try to avoid generating a long list of ground rules. Fewer rules tend to lead to better cooperation from team members–with the ground rules as well as with each other.  If your team raises a lot of matters that they would like incorporated into your list of ground rules, help them consolidate similar or encompassing matters. If you’re still left with too many, help them narrow down the list to what’s most important to them.

Don’t be afraid to revisit this discussion with your team if the list of ground rules turns out to be less than perfect the first time around. Your team is composed of members whose circumstances, attitudes, and experiences may change so it’s okay for your ground rules to do the same.

Practice your facilitation skills at our free weekly Facilitation Lab.

Need an expert facilitator for your next meeting, gathering or workshop? Let’s talk.

Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk or for a consultation.

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