Why meetings

And how does one conduct an effective meeting? Effective team meetings are productive, inclusive, and collaborative. Here are 7 more reasons why you should strive to have effective team meetings. Effective team meetings help you create this strong bond. A strong team dynamic is vital to work success and productivity. Nothing beats a physical team meeting to create and maintain a good working relationship.

Effective team meetings allow teams to discuss complex issues and talk through ideas and solutions. Effective team meetings enable teams to get on the same page quickly than emails will ever do. An effective team meeting is essential to issue resolution and brainstorming. Effective team meetings also promote inclusion.

It becomes an avenue for them to freely express their thoughts and ideas. They know that they can share their inputs and they are heard loud and clear. Culture plays a vital role here.

Effective team meetings allow employees to showcase critical thinking, creativity, and ingenuity. You can come up with a good idea alone. But think of the possibility of creating even better ideas when you and your team work together. Effective team meetings are a great channel for feedback and continuous improvement. Feedback is given instantaneously and this open communication allows your team members to grow professionally.

Team meetings are a great way to learn more about working with your team and how you can continuously improve. A team retrospective is a good example of such a meeting. When team members feel that their inputs are solicited and considered, it helps them value their job more. It also motivates them to contribute to the improvement of the team and the organization as a whole. This sense of belonging solidifies their place in the organization and helps them appreciate their work. When you have high employee engagement, expect more productive employees and better overall results for your business.

Here are some tips on how you can make sure to always have an effective and engaging team meeting. What is the purpose of your team meeting? What do you want to share during the meeting? Unnecessary meetings may waste time, lead to frustration and negativity and may lower motivation to participate in future meetings.

This will very much depend on the type of meeting to be held. There should be some rationale behind every meeting, no matter how low-level or informal, and this will largely dictate the content and indicate how planning should proceed.

This is often decided by the nature of the meeting itself. In a small organisation, a meeting could well include all members of staff, whereas a working party or committee meeting will already have its members pre-determined.

In a large organisation or department, staff attending might well be representing others. It is important that the full implications of such representation are realised by the individuals concerned as they are not merely speaking for themselves. Meetings outside the workplace may include members of the board of directors or other interested parties. If maximum contribution is to be forthcoming from all participants, the purpose of the meeting should be recognised by all.

The most tangible expression of this is the agenda which should be circulated beforehand to all those invited to the meeting. The agenda should:. The Agenda: This is the outline plan for the meeting.

In most formal meetings it is drawn up by the secretary in consultation with the chairperson. The secretary must circulate the agenda well in advance of the meeting, including any accompanying papers.

The secretary also requests items for inclusion in the agenda. Consider this excerpt from the corporate blog of a senior executive in the pharmaceutical industry:. If the alternative to more meetings is more autocratic decision-making, less input from all levels throughout the organization, and fewer opportunities to ensure alignment and communication by personal interaction, then give me more meetings any time!

To be sure, meetings are essential for enabling collaboration, creativity, and innovation. They often foster relationships and ensure proper information exchange. They provide real benefits.

But why would anyone argue in defense of excessive meetings, especially when no one likes them much? Because executives want to be good soldiers.

They overlook the collective toll on productivity, focus, and engagement. For one thing, time is zero-sum. Another issue is the stiff price companies pay for badly run meetings.

Happiness at work takes a hit too. A study by Steven Rogelberg, of the University of North Carolina, and colleagues showed that how workers feel about the effectiveness of meetings correlates with their general satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their jobs, even after controlling for personality traits and environmental factors such as work design, supervision, and pay.

Instead of improving communication and collaboration, as intended, bad meetings undermine those things. Consider the executive who stabbed her leg with a pencil. Did that staff meeting advance teamwork or set it back? A few positive experiences a week cannot make up for a lot of excruciating, wasteful ones.

Often the results can be dramatic and extend far beyond the conference room. We have seen how much organizations can benefit when they focus their energy on transforming meetings instead of just tolerating them.

Problems ensue when meetings are scheduled and run without regard to their impact on both group and solo work time. Often groups end up sacrificing collective or individual needs—or both—by default. Balancing those needs effectively is ideal, but few organizations do that.

Other respondents said their meetings fall into one of these categories:. Some organizations have relatively few meetings but run them poorly. As a result, individuals have sufficient time for solo tasks and deep thinking, but group productivity and collaboration are weakened because each meeting is inefficient. A team at a global e-commerce company we studied had just one or two meetings a week, but they still felt like a waste of group time for several reasons.

Second, the agenda was often vague or redundant with side conversations that had already occurred, so the meetings felt like a rubber-stamping of decisions made elsewhere. Third, when new issues were raised, next steps were usually left unclear, leading to more sidebar conversations outside the room. One software developer told us that he kept showing up for the meetings even though he rarely got anything out of them, because his attendance was expected by his manager and everyone else.

As a workaround, he covertly did his own tasks during meeting time. While this may seem like a harmless way to maintain individual productivity in the short term, it causes group productivity and camaraderie to deteriorate over the long term. For each session, prework was sent out with adequate notice, clear goals were established, and meeting time was managed against an agenda.

Group updates and decisions were consequently handled efficiently. However, as the firm grew over time, more and more meetings were added to the weekly calendar. Although they were well run, their sheer volume interrupted work flow and took away time that the investment staff could dedicate to critical individual tasks, such as sourcing new opportunities and deepening relationships with managers at companies the firm owned or sought to own.

Sometimes tasks get dropped or shortchanged. But more often people steal from their personal time to get that work done, a sacrifice that research and practice have shown can lead to burnout and turnover—steep prices for both employees and organizations.

Many organizations we have worked with endure the triple whammy of meetings that are 1 too frequent, 2 poorly timed, and 3 badly run, leading to losses in productivity, collaboration, and well-being for both groups and individuals. This is the worst-case scenario—and, unfortunately, the most prevalent. Ask them. Include your own answers as well. What three words or phrases come to mind when you think about the meetings you attend regularly? How many meetings did you attend, and how much time did you spend in them altogether?

Week by week, did you spend more or less time in meetings than usual? What about day by day? How does that compare with your typical schedule? The total time your organization spends on meetings, along with the average amounts per week and day. How much those figures vary in your organization by person, role, function, or group.