Making Meetings More Useful

© Coert Visser and Gwenda Schlundt Bodien (2005)

“We have so many meetings in this organization but they lead to nothing but frustration. The wrong topics are on the agenda and even those topics aren’t handled properly. Meetings always start too late and are always drawn out. I am sick and tired of it!”

– A manager in a large organization

Meetings can be more useful!

Inefficient meetings are a pain to many managers and employees. Recent research by Microsoft among 38.000 respondents in 200 countries showed that employees are in meetings on average for 5,6 hours a week and according to them no less than 69 percent of this time leads to nothing at all. So it is no wonder that meetings often take away participants’ energy and are seen as useless. By using a success-focused approach in meetings they can be much more effective and less frustrating. The success perspective focuses constantly on making and keeping meetings useful for all participants. This works by posing a special kind of question, which we call useful-questions.

Useful-questions

By asking useful-questions you can constantly help people to focus on what they want to get out of the meeting. You help them to remember what they want to achieve and how this session can help them with that. Instead of telling them how the session is useful for them you ask them. The advantage is that they can judge for themselves and are really activated. You help them to imagine and to visualize how they can apply this session in their own situation. When they verbalize this for themselves it becomes much more likely that this will fit exactly to their goals and circumstances.

The next checklist contains examples of useful-questions that you can apply before, during and after meetings. It is not our suggestions to use all these questions. After all, too much of a thing is good for nothing. What we do intend is to provide you with some suggestions of questions that you may use in different phases of the meeting. Asking some of these questions at well-chosen moment can make meetings much more productive.

CHECKLIST USEFULNESS-QUESTIONS IN MEETINGS

Before and/or at the beginning of the meeting you may ask the following questions:

• What topic(s) should be discussed to make it a useful session for you?
• How will you know after the session has ended it will have been useful for you? What will be different?
• What small thing can you do to get as much as possible from this meeting?

During the meeting you may ask the following questions:

• Is/was this useful for you?
• If yes, how is it useful?
• If no, how could we make it more useful?
• How can we use the remaining time as well as possible?

After or at the end of the meeting you may ask the following questions:

• Has this meeting been useful for you?
• What has been most useful for you?
• How can you apply this?
• Which small step can you take tomorrow?

Keeping participants involved constantly

Asking useful-questions at the beginning helps to involve everyone actively in the process. Furthermore, it can help to really improve the agenda of the meeting. Asking useful-questions during the meeting can be very handy too, especially when a topic is ended. It also helps to keep people actively involved. They can decide for themselves and explain in their own words whether and how the topic is useful for them and if it is not what should happen to make it more useful. Sometimes you notice as a chairman you may doubt whether the participants see a topic or discussion as useful. For instance, you may get nonverbal cues that something is wrong or that something occupies others. They may frown, look at their watches or lean backwards for instance. These moments are typically suited for useful-questions. The interesting thing about these questions is that they are very much directed towards success while problems or complaints can always be addressed. The essence of the approach can be used in many types of conversations ranging from one-on-one conversations like coaching sessions and appraisal conversations to various types of group meetings like trainings and department meetings but also more large-scale events like organization-wide conferences.

Meeting rules that work here and now

In addition to the checklist with useful-questions it is good to point out that it is often wise to work with meeting rules. But be careful with generic rules you read about in books. Each organization and team will need a specific set of rules that will work best there. Therefore it is good to formulate, preferably together with your team, your own set of meeting rules. To give you an impression of what those rules might look like, here are a few examples. We know an organization how uses an 80% attendance rule, which means that team members have to attend 80% of the meetings and be on time for those. Not attending a maximum of 20% of the meetings is accepted. Here is another example. A rule that seems to work well in many places is to work with strict starting and ending times. When you use this rule it often works well to ask the following question 15 minutes before closing time: ‘How can we make the best use of the remaining 15 minutes?’

Experiment with this

Our invitation to you is to experiment a bit with this approach. It is certainly not necessary to apply all these suggestions at once. It will probably be wiser to start small and give yourself and your employees some time to get used to this way of improving the usefulness of your meetings.

Also read this related article: The solution-focused reflecting management team – Visser & Norman (2004)