Co-founder of job search engine Adzuna. Present in 16 countries and helping 10s of millions of job seekers every month.
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We’ve all been stuck in a bad meeting, whether it’s in your current company or in a previous job. The hallmarks are usually pretty clear: there's no agenda, nobody's in charge, the meeting starts late or overruns and you find yourself scratching your head and wondering if you should even be in the meeting in the first place.
This new virtual world we find ourselves in can make meetings even more challenging. As an HR leader and co-founder of a business, I have over 15 years of experience running meetings under my belt. While I won’t pretend to have all the answers, and I can definitely say that I've made a lot of mistakes along the way, in doing so I’ve developed some best practice advice for running an effective meeting. These tips and tricks can work for anyone, whether you’re the CFO or a social media intern.
1. Question whether you even need the meeting at all, and be ruthless about who needs to be there. Will email, Skype or Slack do instead? Remember that “sometimes five minutes spent with six people separately is more effective and productive than a half-hour meeting with them all together.”
If you look at your calendar on a Monday morning and all you see is a sea of meetings, one-to-ones and regular catch-ups, you’re probably doing it wrong. It doesn’t matter when you do it, but the beginning of the month is often a good time to clean up your regular fixtures and rethink your approach to meetings and who needs to be there.
2. Prepare in advance to have a clear purpose and lead for the meeting. Send a detailed meeting agenda or any pre-reading well in advance so everyone knows exactly why they are there and how they can contribute. Keep the meeting on track, focus the group on the task at hand and avoid going off on tangents. In a remote meeting, it’s useful to let everyone know how they can get involved, whether that’s asking for comments in the group chat, encouraging the use of features like “raise a hand” or nominating a time for each person to speak. Involve everyone and capture and share any rolling action items or hot topics on a shared document — and actually look at it at the start of the next meeting.
3. Break the ice. Let people settle in with some chit-chat, then get to the point. Avoid formal, lengthy icebreakers like “What three celebrities would you like to have a dinner party with?” and keep it human, real and fun. Encourage people to have their cameras on (at least initially) and try to be as personable as possible. Sometimes just a fun new video call background can trigger some pre-business chat.
4. Create a level playing field in a remote or hybrid world. We won’t all be working from our kitchen tables forever, and when we return to the office it’s important to include and encourage participation from people dialing into a meeting. Try to create the verbal space for remote workers to contribute and participate as much as possible. Even if it’s just a social call, use your initiative to make people who aren’t in the room feel like they are.
5. Keep your meetings fresh, interactive and engaging. Think about how you can make your meetings more interactive and interesting, and keep recurring meetings varied. For example, you could start with a quiz one week and end the next week’s meeting with a Q&A. Or start a poll in the chat. It’s a great idea to share your personal best practices. Getting people to dive into a shared document with their ideas for five minutes or so can also help get the creative juices flowing, as well as drive engagement.
We’re all trying to find our way and be as productive as possible in this, still fairly new, remote world. Challenge yourself and your teams to think differently about meetings; keep them fresh, fun, engaging and on topic, and you’ll no doubt see the benefits.
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