"Reduce, Consolidate, And Improve" – A Meeting Mantra

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Inefficient meetings are costing companies millions and harming employee morale. A new three-pronged approach, "Reduce, Consolidate, and Improve," aims to reclaim wasted time and boost productivity. First, reduce meeting frequency and duration, aiming for at least two fewer hours per person weekly. Replace update meetings with asynchronous solutions like dashboards and ensure all recurring meetings have clear agendas, canceling those without purpose. Second, consolidate fragmented calendars to create larger, uninterrupted blocks of focus time, designating and protecting these "no meeting" windows for deep work. Finally, improve the quality of essential meetings through better preparation with clear purpose statements, active facilitation to manage discussions, and a strong close to recap decisions and assign next steps. Adopting this mantra promises more effective and efficient collaboration. A simple, three-word phrase can have an outsized impact when there’s a big message to get across. Stop, drop, and roll. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Stop, collaborate, and listen. (Ok, maybe not that last one – sorry, Vanilla Ice.) Here’s a new one for you: Reduce, consolidate, and improve. Your meetings, that is. Companies are wasting millions of dollars a year – and killing morale – by simply not caring how time is used, especially when it comes to meetings. Shifting an organization’s relationship to time is no easy feat. But there are three relatively simple changes you can make to start recovering all that time, money, and morale. Do you even know how much of your team’s time each week is spent in meetings? If you ask them, I’m sure the answer will be “too much.” Set a goal to reduce the time by at least two hours a week per person. Start by looking at your “update” meetings – meetings where the goal is not to solve a problem or make a decision, but rather to share information. Standing team and project meetings tend to fall into this category, especially if they’re not well-facilitated. Instead, try leveraging an asynchronous solution for updates, like a shared status report or dashboard. This way, leaders and team members can access the information they need without sitting through a mind-numbing meeting pretending to listen. Next, take a look at recurring meetings, including your 1:1s with direct reports. Could any of these be shorter, or less frequent? Could some 1:1s be replaced with office hours? If you tend to use 1:1s to review deliverables, could this feedback be delivered asynchronously instead? For other recurring meetings, I recommend instituting a firm team norm requiring an agenda for each instance to ensure each one has a purpose. Without an agenda, teams tend to just fill the time since it’s on the calendar. If you don’t need an instance, great – cancel it. Once you’ve eliminated low-value meetings, it’s time to get strategic with your calendar. Focus time is much more valuable in large uninterrupted blocks. Typically, two full hours of uninterrupted time is required to make meaningful progress on thinking work. If your calendar is fragmented with meetings floating around short windows of working time, do some rescheduling to have larger blocks of both. It helps to designate “no meeting” windows when you are at your mental best (e.g., first thing in the morning). Once you find focus time, block it and protect it. I recommend labeling focus time on your calendar with what you need to accomplish and linking the associated documents. This practice helps to ensure you’ll make good use of the time. Finally, make the meetings you keep matter more by improving the quality of your preparation, your facilitation, and your close: Preparation: Make sure all of your invites include a purpose statement and agenda. Purpose statements are different from meeting topics in that they make clear what kind of action will be taken. Think “Decide on Q3 marketing tactics and determine next steps” instead of “Q3 Marketing Meeting.” A purpose statement helps potential attendees decide whether they need to attend and how they need to prepare. Facilitation: Meetings require active management for good outcomes. Draw out quieter voices using a round robin for key questions or by asking them a direct question. Manage people who are taking up a disproportionate amount of airtime by acknowledging their point and then inviting other perspectives. Ask a colleague to help you keep time to be sure you’re advancing at the right pace to address your full agenda. Close: Wind down your discussion with 5-10 minutes left, and use this time to verbally recap decisions and affirm next steps with their owners. Without a strong close, you’ll likely find yourself having the same discussions again in the not-so-distant future. While meetings tend to be the default mode of collaboration, they’re frequently not the best use of time. Adopt “Reduce, consolidate, and improve” as your team’s mantra, and effective, efficient collaboration is sure to follow.

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