Meeting culture: Skeletons at the meeting table - managementberatung | coaching
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3 min.

Leadership | Meetings

Time goes by: How to turn time-wasters into productive meetings.

From Sabine Walter, Head of netzwerk managementberatung | coaching

Executives spend between 60-90% of their working time in meetings. They lose more than one working day per week to unproductive meetings, according to a study by the market research company Harris. This is often because meetings are often inadequately prepared, not really led and the simplest ground rules are not followed.

The following tips will help you to increase the productivity of your meetings so that you can make good use of your working time and that of your colleagues.

Preliminary considerations for meetings

  • Do we really need this meeting or can the issue be resolved more quickly elsewhere?
  • What result do I want to have at the end of the meeting?
  • Who do I need for this?
  • How long will it take us?
  • What do participants need in advance to come to the meeting well prepared and to support me in achieving my outcome?

Tools for everyday life

Canvas for meeting preparation

We have described the preparation of a discussion of essential issues in a Canvas summarised. To Download please click on the image or the caption.

Canvas for preparing meetings - managementberatung | coaching
Canvas for meeting preparation
Download Canvas

Conducting meetings

Start and end your meetings on time. To ensure that every participant has a chance of arriving on time, it is recommended that meetings are always to start on the hour or half hour and to end a quarter before or a quarter after the hour. This automatically prevents appointment from bordering on appointment.

The invitations to your meetings should contain the information and documents that participants need to prepare and support you in achieving the desired outcome. Proven to be effective:

  • Topic and desired outcome
  • Time frame and space
  • Agenda
  • Time per agenda item with responsible person

Formulate the agenda points in the form of open questions, such as "How will we succeed in making more sales in the coming year?", "What do we have to do to complete the project on schedule?". Then the subconscious of the participants is already thinking about answers, even if the participants are not actively preparing for the meeting.

To avoid electronic devices becoming a disruptive factor in your meetings, establish the rule that Mobile phones and laptops remain switched off. For longer meetings, plan appropriate breaks that allow participants to work on emails or make important calls.

Further:

  • Visualise the desired outcome so that all participants can see it.
  • Keep track of the time and agenda. Indicate intermediate times if necessary.
  • Interrupt frequent speakers by addressing them by name and lead back to the thread.
  • Steer the meeting through open questions and summaries.

Follow-up to meetings

To save time in voting the minutes after the meeting, Record in the meeting. You can introduce this at the end of each agenda item with the question: "What do we record in the minutes?

And as we all know, after the game is before the game, reflect on the meeting for yourself at the end. What went well? What needs to be changed to make the next meeting even more productive. Use the insights gained for the next meeting.

In order not to lose time at the beginning of the follow-up meeting in discussions why what was discussed was not implemented or not implemented as agreed, keep agreed measures from the next meeting.

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