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Many areas of higher education involve working with an established team who needs to meet in person or virtually on a regular basis. If these team meetings lack a clear structure and time management plan, they can take longer than scheduled, fail to cover necessary information, or leave important voices unheard. In addition, some teams experience a lack of enthusiasm, outright boredom, or the feeling that a meeting “could have been an email.” Sound familiar?
In the “Why meetings suck and how to fix them” episode of his “WorkLife” podcast, organizational psychologist Adam Grant suggests that “[i]t often feels like bad meetings are inevitable — although we dread them, we have no idea how to escape them.” The problem, Grant argues, is that the norms of team meetings “aren’t based on strong evidence, and people rarely rethink them — even when meetings become excruciating.” Grant goes on to discuss common problems with team meetings and some potential ways to fix them. This article will build on Grant’s advice and offer several strategies to help you streamline meetings, optimize productivity, and ensure every team member has a voice.
Rethinking the Basics
In order to address the problem of inefficient meetings, Grant says that we there are four “conversations” that need to happen among the team members. First, question how many meetings are actually necessary for your team to function smoothly. “We often worry about what we’ll lose if we drop meetings. But we also need to think about what’s lost by continuing to hold them,” Grant argues. Meeting bloat is widespread across industries. Research from Microsoft reveals that inefficient meetings are the number one workspace distraction, and “meeting fatigue” hinders productivity and job satisfaction.
The next conversation your team should have is about meeting length. As Grant advises, “[i]nstead of defaulting to standard meeting lengths, talk about how much time is needed for each one.” Shorter meetings can allow teams to connect, debrief, and get aligned without taking too much time from everyone’s schedule. The third conversation is about who needs to be invited to each meeting. Grant notes that some organizations will invite more people to a meeting under the guise of inclusion, but large meetings rarely offer the opportunity for diverse voices to be heard. Finally, talk about how you can invite active participation in your team meetings so that everyone is contributing and getting something out of the experience.
Preparation Pays Off
According to Grant, lack of preparation — by meeting organizers and attendees — is the primary culprit of inefficient meetings. Without a clear agenda and defined expectations, meetings will lag, meander, and miss important insights. One remedy is what Grant calls a “question-based approach” to meeting preparation. It starts with including specific questions for the participants in the meeting invitation, so that people arrive charged up with ideas. As Grant points out, “questions force the meeting organizer to be more thoughtful and structured.” You might also utilize questions in the meeting agenda, helping to cultivate what Grant calls a “natural dynamic of inquiry” in the meeting itself.
The agenda is the backbone of any team meeting, and it is also the place where you define the meeting’s purpose and scope. Ideally, the agenda is distributed to the team ahead of time, and it is clear and short enough that every member has a chance to look it over before the meeting. In addition to utilizing questions, as Grant suggested, some other considerations for an effective agenda include assigning realistic time slots for each topic, indicating the participation strategies that will be used, and doing a “sanity check” to make sure that the expectations of the meeting are reasonable for the allotted time frame.
Shake Things Up
If your team is functioning smoothly, but your meetings still seem like they are in a rut, you might consider some creative ways to shake things up. Grant is a fan of stand-up and walking meetings, but it is important to consider team members’ differential mobilities and any accessibility barriers before implementing that type of strategy. Grant also suggests rotating who runs the meetings as a way of building team strength and giving agency to all members. Especially in higher ed, a “shared governance model” helps elevate the needs of “diverse campus stakeholders,” according to Professor Jonathan Hinton Westover of Utah Valley University. Westover advises that meetings should “include representatives from faculty, staff, students, administration as appropriate” in order to “encourage open discussion and consensus building.”
For workplaces that are heavily burdened by meeting bloat, consider a bold reset on your team’s approach to meetings. You could implement a “Meeting Doomsday” where all scheduled and recurring meetings are wiped from the calendar, and everyone starts over with blank slates. Then, put in place strategies to streamline meetings moving forward: set limits on number of attendees per meeting, designate certain days of the week as meeting-free, and normalize turning down meeting invites when your schedule is overloaded or you have nothing to contribute. Westover also emphasizes that in higher ed, it is important to “track progress gently” and “celebrate milestones,” since the pace of projects might be slower than in other industries.
Conclusion
No matter how much thought and intention you put into your team meetings, there will still be times when folks are bored, or someone’s idea gets ignored, or it becomes clear that the meeting could have been an email. There is no perfect strategy for team meetings, because teams and their needs change over time. The important things are to recognize when things aren’t working and be willing to make changes that benefit the team dynamic. As Grant reminds us: “Better meetings mean better work — and better work days. That’s the promise of a world with fewer and more engaging meetings. When our time is used more efficiently, we can contribute more effectively. And actually enjoy our work more too.”
