Meetings are a pain. Few people like interrupting their workday to go sit in a conference room and listen to the weekly or daily updates that could have more easily and succinctly been conveyed through an email.
While face-to-face meetings are necessary to maintain organization-wide cohesion and information-sharing, they often "end up being about preening and politicking, and devolve into productivity-robbing, mind-numbing monotony," according to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Andy Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager and author.
Citing a 2013 study by officebroker.com, the average office worker spends 16 hours in meetings every week, and government workers spend 22 hours in meetings. That's a lot of time that, unfortunately, may be considered wasted if meetings aren't productive.
Every organization is different, and leaders must find the strategies that work for them, making meetings more useful depending on their corporate culture. The following 7 strategies come from existing organizations.
1. Set "no meeting" days. According to the article, some executives at Twitter and Apple reserve Mondays for meetings and let the rest of the weekdays be dedicated to getting real work done. Another example comes from BuzzFeed, where President Jon Steinberg sets aside Tuesdays and Thursdays as "no meeting" days.
2. Set a narrow agenda for meetings. To ensure meetings stay on topic and don't run too long, choose one topic and set a short cap on time. Mr. Kessler cites an executive who runs a music startup that restricts each meeting to a single topic and limits them to 10 minutes. With such a short amount of time, there will only be time for sharing meaningful information and asking important questions.
3. Prohibit the use of electronics. To prevent meeting attendees from checking their Twitter or Instagram feeds instead of listening to the discussion in meetings, give employees a heads up on not to bring any electronic devices into the meeting space.
4. Answer dumb questions with an action item. According to the article, when an investor or outside board member asks a stupid question during a meeting, executives can respond by asking the questioner to investigate the answer to their own question by assigning them an action item. People will be less inclined to ask such questions over time and meetings can run more swiftly.
5. Videotape meetings. To encourage "real honesty" and "radical transparency," Ray Dalio from the hedge-fund Bridgewater Associates began videotaping meetings and making them available to the employees to review later, according to the article. When people know they're being videotaped, they're more likely to spend time preparing what they are going to say and not waste time blabbering.
6. Keep meetings to the minimum number of attendees. According to the article, productivity in meetings falls as more workers are in attendance, so the fewer people the better.
7. Cancel meetings and use technology to communicate. Although this one could be tricky to implement, it's possible to replace meetings entirely with digital collaboration tools. For example, Salesforce.com lets companies with up to 5,000 employees use its data- and file-sharing app called Chatter for free, according to the article.