Kill meetings, be more productive

Management consultant Art Petty writes (and speaks) often on improving standard workplace practices -- and especially the ‘time sink’ practices that tend to reduce productivity and move a team away from their goals, as opposed to closer to them.

For most workplaces, two of the biggest ‘time sinks’ are also two of the most essential and long-held processes:

• Meetings
• E-Mails

We’ll handle e-mails in a separate post (hint: use collaborative software and talk to your co-workers instead of ‘pinging’ them), but for now, let’s talk about how to have less meetings -- and as a result, be more productive.

How to reduce meetings and drive strategy forward

Start with this basic understanding: meetings are not work. They are a way of talking about work, yes, and hopefully a way of moving forward ideas and getting people on the same page. But they’re not actual work. And if you’re always in meetings, there still needs to be a time to get actual work done.

Back to Mr. Petty now. He wrote this blog about '17 Ways Your Strategy Will Fail.'

Here's his basic list of reasons (we won't do all of them):

• No shared view of what strategy is
• Confusion over who owns strategy
• Cross-purposes over vocabulary and key concepts
• Management team isn't functioning as a team, but rather a series of individuals
• Strategy is treated as a one-or-two-time event, not a continuous process
• Power, politics, and status quo thinking
• Expecting templates to churn out transformative results
• Long-game strategy in a time when adaptability is more relevant
• Letting strategy determine budget

There's more -- you can read them all at the link above -- but you get the idea.

This idea of "strategy treated as a one-or-two-time event" is interesting. Organizations often have these big off-site meetings once or twice a year to talk about strategy and bring people from different offices together, but by the very nature of doing that, you waste a lot of time with catch-up and operational issues and don't really discuss strategy. Plus, if business changes so quickly, isn't strategy something that should be constantly evolving? Here's what Petty says:

Strategy is treated like an event, not a continuous process. Too many firms relegate the critical dialog about future directions and opportunities to one or two off-site events every year. It’s a constant dialog, not a one or two-shot activity.

“Strategy" feels like a big word and an important thing you need to tackle, so the mentality of doing two big deep-dives on it annually makes some sense.

But there's a more effective way.

Most senior leadership teams meet with one another, either in person or on Skype/conference call, at least once a week. Oftentimes it's more than that. Let's say it's twice a week, right? That's eight times per month.

If you have eight senior leadership meetings in a month, here's how to break it down:

• 5 dedicated to a specific area of the company and what's going on there (Sales, Marketing, Talent, Finance, and Operations, let's say)
• In those 5 meetings, no topics can be broached outside of the "theme" of the meeting
• 1 meeting around "deeper questions" such as What do we want to be as a company and even some discussions of failure
• 1 meeting around financial metrics
• 1 meeting around strategy: Are we in line with what we've been discussing? What do we want to change?

The real key here is that after the financial meeting and the strategy meeting, those senior leaders need to go and summarize those meetings to their direct reports, and to the reports of their direct reports.

Now you have fewer meetings, and the meetings you are having are actually pushing strategy forward. Awesome, right?

If you did those eight meetings per month in that way above, you'd probably come out of every month with a pretty good understanding of your money (what's important to most people), your talent (the people who do the work), your strategy, and even some idea of how your team is supposed to fit together.

How to make meetings more fun, useful, and productive

If you’re looking to have the same amount of meetings (boo) but focus them better, consider some of the below.

This is from a newish article on Fast Company; here's a few key sections and thoughts:

At chat software provider LivePerson, leaders decided that meetings were a good opportunity for staff members to get to know one another better. Using a technique called "connection before content," the leader poses a question at the start of a meeting designed to get people out of their comfort zones. For example, "What are your doubts about something you're working on?" The exercise has been so effective that the company shared the idea with its customers.

Brivo, a security management software provider, keeps meetings on point with its "No Rehash" rule. Employees signal to others that a topic has already been addressed by raising the "No Rehash" Ping-Pong paddle.

"I started noticing that we kept making many of the same decisions over and over again," says president and CEO Steve Van Till, who instituted the rule by giving "No Rehash" paddles to everyone in the company. "It’s a visual reminder, but more importantly it empowers everyone in the company to call out counterproductive rehashing whenever and wherever they see it. The big time savings is that no one has to justify invoking the rule itself, and the meeting can proceed with earlier decisions intact."

The staff at Tripping.com, the search engine for vacation rentals, sets a stopwatch for 30 minutes at the beginning of each meeting to maximize everyone’s time. If the meeting goes longer, the person who called the meeting must throw $5 in the team beer jar.

True to their culture, employees at mobile game publisher Genera Games hold their meetings on the basketball court, shooting hoops and playing a quick game.

"We try to keep our meeting focused and fun," says Daniel Entrenas, Genera's indie labs manager. "By getting the blood flowing, we also allow ourselves to think outside the box and get more creative with our ideas."

The overall takeaway

Your goals here are:

• Clear priorities
• Productivity
• Growth
• Revenue
• Strong processes
• Strong relationships with customers

If all you’re doing is racing from Meeting A to Meeting B, all of the above bullet points can suffer -- and remember, the ultimate goal for your field service organization is profitability. To learn more about the path to profit, check out our 10 ways to make your field service organization a profit center eBook. 

Written by Shloma Baum