Meetings can be the bane of an office worker’s existence. Anyone who’s ever seen The Office has likely experienced a little PTSD watching those Michael Scott-led meetings. You know, the ones with no real agenda, that go horribly off-topic, and drag on for an interminable amount of time.
Whether intentional or not, meeting practices create a meeting culture that shapes a team’s behavior, expectations, and attitudes. To get the most out of your meetings, you’ll want to take control of your organization’s meeting culture.
Treat your meetings like a product
What’s meeting culture, you ask? It’s basically the result of every meeting your company has had. It’s best to think of it as an early release of a smartphone app: it may function, but there are likely bugs. A great way to uncover them is to gather a peer group and use Triz, a brainstorming-like exercise developed by the Liberating Structures community. Here’s how to apply it:
What would you have to do to have the worst meeting possible? Make a list of everything you can think of.
Review this list and ask yourself, “Is there anything that we’re currently doing that in any way, shape or form resembles anything on the list?” Be brutally honest here and create a second list of all of your counterproductive activities/programs/procedures.
Take a hard look at your second list and decide what steps will help prevent the undesirable results.
People are generally too nervous to bring up the bugs of a company’s meeting culture, but Triz creates an opportunity to collectively discuss what isn’t working. And once you know what’s wrong, you can begin to address it.
Lessons identified vs. lessons learned
Using Triz or a similar method, you can build a list of lessons identified. Lessons identified are the observations, insights, and feedback you’ve recorded about how to improve the way you run meetings. While merely documenting all of this can feel like a huge achievement, you can’t stop there. Lessons must be accompanied by actions if they are to be considered lessons learned.
You must put in place a new procedure, policy or framework, then widely communicate this update to your meeting culture so working practices can be changed. If nothing changes, nothing was learned.
For example, a lesson identified could be that people feel some of the meetings they’re invited to are not relevant for them. In response, you could declare that “all meetings are optional.” While this could be scandalous at some companies, I’ve seen it have great impact.
If a team member doesn’t feel a meeting is appropriate for them, they’re free to decline it. It’s a small gesture, but a reflection of the belief that many meetings don’t need to happen. This policy can lead to an increase in quick and direct conversations as well as fewer meetings. It can also create more space and time for the things people want (and need) to do.
Meeting debt, or how to build a repository of meetings
Meeting debt is what contributes to a meeting culture. It’s all the unchecked meetings and habits that don’t work, and may even be toxic.
The harm of bad meetings can really metastasize. Initially they may just frustrate some team members, but then could instill a sense of dread in a larger group of people. Eventually, it could create a sense of apathy and pessimism across your entire company.
Meeting debt, however, is not insurmountable. If you do the work to fix your meeting system, you can begin to pay off your meeting debt. To do this, you’ll need to develop a repository of meetings.
A repository of meetings is a record of meetings you’ve held in the past — the objectives, the outcomes, etc. Capturing these should be easy, as meetings shouldn’t be called without a purpose.
If you find that you’ve held a lot of meetings without a clear objective — and defined next steps — that’s a critical bit of information to take note of. When considering how well (or how badly) your meetings have gone, here are a handful of questions to ask:
What percentage of attendees took an active role in participating?
How effectively were participants able to communicate?
What did you and the participants learn/discover? What did you want to learn/discover, but did not?
Were the right people invited to the meeting? Who didn’t need to be there? Who should have been there, but wasn’t invited?
What kind of feedback did you receive after the meeting?
Did the meeting fulfill your objective?
Using human-centered design to improve your meetings
A meeting should meet the needs of its participants. Your meeting culture will be more positive when team members feel the meetings they’re asked to attend are beneficial to them and their work.
A human-centered design process puts the user — whoever will be engaging with the end product — at the very core of the design process. When using this process to design better meetings, your attendees will be your user/consumer.
PHASE 1: ENGAGE AND OBSERVE
Observe the way your team members behave in meetings to better understand them; this will help you design meetings suited for them. Look for patterns of behavior. Find challenges that team members seem to be facing — perhaps distractions, self-consciousness, communication issues, or something else entirely.
PHASE 2: IDEATION
Generate ideas about how you can play to your team’s strengths and support their weaknesses. Don’t get caught in the nitty-gritty of whether each idea will work or how it will work. This is a brainstorming exercise so just let your creativity drive you. Be sure to keep your team’s needs and desires at the forefront of your mind during this phase.
PHASE 3: PROTOTYPING
In this phase, you’ll be prototyping methods and activities. Perhaps you’ll come up with a fun new way to start your meetings that makes everyone feel more relaxed or rethink the time of day you’re meeting. Keep in mind, this stage is not about being perfect. There will be time to refine your prototype, so don’t feel pressured to get it right the first time.
PHASE 4: FEEDBACK
Test your meeting prototype on the teammates who attend your meetings. Let them know exactly what need or desire you’re aiming to fulfill, and ask them how the prototype either succeeds or fails. Be sure to collect as many details as possible; the more information you have, the better prepared you’ll be for the next phase.
PHASE 5: INTEGRATION
Review the feedback you’ve received and use it to make your prototype better. Perhaps you moved meetings to the beginning of the workday because your team was easily distracted by obligations later in the afternoon, but found they weren’t ready to get deep early in the morning. This phase is all about testing and repeating, so it’s OK to experiment with other times until you’ve found the best one [I recommend 1 - 3 on Tuesdays - Thursdays].
PHASE 6: APPLICATION
Apply your new human-centered meeting tactic. Whatever your solution, bring it into your meetings. Keep in mind that teams change, people change, the world changes, and therefore needs change. There may be a day when your solution is no longer serving your team; if this happens, return to phase one and repeat the process.
Rebooting your meeting culture isn’t hard, it merely requires a focused effort. Involve your peers in workshopping what your optimal meeting culture looks like, find ways to address your shortcomings, and continually reassess what you’re doing. Oscar, Stanley, and the rest of the office will appreciate it.