by John J. Walters

I stumbled across this humorous image about meetings as I was scouring the web for seed ideas for this week’s blog post, and it reminded me of why we started this site in the first place.  Simply put: meetings suck.  But they don’t have to.  Most people regard meetings as pointless wastes of time, and in many cases they’re right to do so.

The idea of paying employees to sit through weekly (sometimes daily) meetings that can only be described as “complete wastes of time” must make most business owners cringe.  But if they’re all bad, then why don’t we abolish meetings entirely?

Meetings are an unfortunate reality of life in the business world, but they certainly don’t have to be as bad as they are.  We have emails, phone calls, and text messages to keep employees updated.  We have services like PBworks (which MeetingCaptain syncs with, incidentally) to allow coworkers to facilitate collaboration without anyone being in the same room.  Most people resent the technological leash that businesses are using these days, but I’m sure they would resent it a lot less if it meant a massive reduction in the number and length of pointless meetings they are required to attend.

True, some things need to be hashed out in a group setting.  When my team was working together on the first draft of our book, our weekly meetings were essential to keeping the project rolling and maintaining a high quality of work.  The idea that we would all have to justify our work to each other on a weekly basis provided a healthy atmosphere of competition and accountability.  In fact, we often found ourselves going over the allotted time because we had so much to accomplish.

If I wanted to keep the meeting to a manageable length, I found that I sometimes had to shortchange my own work even though I was the team lead and project manager.  Then I realized that if I didn’t want to cut work time, I had to make an effort to cut the seemingly obligatory logistics update at the beginning of the meeting.  How did I do this?  By making good use of technology.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have MeetingCaptain or PBworks to help me back then.  Instead of adding everyone to one online workspace and using that to store the latest files and communicate important updates I had to send a lot of emails and keep painstaking account of each and every draft.  It required a lot of preparation, but it also allowed me to keep the meetings shorter than two hours.  It also placed the burden almost entirely on me to make sure we had a good meeting, even though I was only one of the seven participants.

Running a good meeting requires a lot of strategizing and coordinating.  That’s a fact.  But if you can take care of the first part, then technology can take care of the second.

by John J. Walters

It’s okay.  Everyone does it from time to time.  It usually happens when you are talking about some topic that you care about more passionately than the conversation’s other participants, like that time you did that thing in that place with those people.  It gets even harder to be interesting in a business setting, when all the dirty jokes and crazy stories are off limits.

The tricky part is, sometimes we have to impart some information that is not interesting in the least.  This is a sad fact of life in the business world, and one that is not likely to change no matter how slick our technology may get.  Even when we have those holographic briefing centers from science fiction films, it will still be hard to keep people interested in a presentation on TPS reports.

So what to do?  First of all, you need to know when you are being a bit of a bore.  There’s lots of ways to tell this, from body language and averted glances to a lack of participation.  Sometimes just the awareness that you’re boring the other parties is enough to make you change your tune.  Ask some more questions, try to wrap things up faster, or toss a joke in there from time to time.  Don’t get frustrated but learn from your experience being the (boring) center of a meeting.  Work to improve.

The other piece of the puzzle is to consider carefully what the best mode of presentation might be for the particular information that you need to convey.  PowerPoint might be the preferred option, but it’s not really suited to every type of lecture.  Indeed, not everything needs to be a lecture.  If you need to teach people something, then make an effort to include some interaction.  If you need them to listen carefully to a lot of details that you know they won’t remember, give them a brief overview verbally and then distribute a handout that they can consult only when they need it.  Be creative.

Think about one of your favorite professors from back in your college days (or teachers from your high-school days).  What made their classes more interesting?  It might have been the subject material, but more than likely they were also an interesting orator who varied their style regularly and encouraged participation.  These aren’t just good ideas for teachers — we can use them quite effectively during business meetings if we’re willing to practice and pay attention to our audience.

by John J. Walters

Ever heard of the 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle?  If you have: good, that’ll save me some time.  If you haven’t: go read up on it.  It will kinda-sorta blow your mind.

I have heard all sorts of different interpretations for the 80-20 rule in my life.  The first one I heard was that 20% of the workers at a company do 80% of the work, and since then I have felt this to be painfully true at each and every one of my jobs.  I have also heard two more interpretations that make some sense.

First, that 80% of a product’s value is realized with the first 20% of effort.  I have found this to be especially true when I write.  I get nearly everything out during the first go-around; then I can spend as much time as I want editing.  But the final product is never that much better than the original draft.

Second, that 80% of everything is crap.  This one is catchier, but I am still a little wary of it.  It may be true and it may not be — but I think a more palatable version of the rule would be that 80% of everything is non-memorable.  20% is generally enough to get the basic idea from something, and that’s usually all people will bother with.

So what does this have to do with meetings?  Just that: people are usually going to walk out of the conference room having only heard about 20% of what you said.  It’s sad but true.  From this, we can learn three very valuable lessons.

Lesson 1: Meetings can be shorter. If people are only going to remember 20% of what is discussed then you might as well not keep them hostage for quite as long as usual.  Who set the standard meeting length at 1 hour?  Seems arbitrary to me.  Perhaps a good motivator for getting people to pay better attention would be to say that the meeting will end as soon as it seems like everyone gets the gist of things.

Lesson 2: You must be careful what you emphasize. Most people will only remember 20% of what you say, but not everyone will remember the same 20%.  This is why you need to make it clear which bits are the important ones and which ones are the details.  Use the three-step salesperson/teacher method:  Tell them what you’re going to tell them.  Tell them.  Then tell them what you told them.

Lesson 3: The follow-up is crucial. Ok, so people are walking out of your meeting with only the basic idea of what’s going on in their heads.  Disaster, right?  Not really — the basic memories of the meeting are still there.  They just need to be nudged a bit.  Best way to do this is by sending out notes as a follow-up right away so that people will have them as a reference.  This way the other 80% won’t simply get lost.

I’m sure you can find other applications for the Pareto Principle in your life and work.  Just don’t take things too far.  Remember, it may be true that you get 80% of a project’s value from the first 20% of work, but the difference between success and failure in the business world is often a margin much slimmer than 20%.  It’s important to spend that time polishing.

by John J. Walters

What was the worst meeting you ever attended?  For most people, this is a difficult question, because the competition is fierce.  I went searching for common meeting complaints this morning, and I found a few decent articles written by people complaining about various behaviors that should be avoided at all costs.

Of course, everyone will have their pet peeves and there will always be professional cynics.  You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but with a little preparation you can organize a decent meeting that won’t bore everyone, especially if you are careful only to schedule one only when it really needs to take place and when you invite only the people who will have relevant input.

But sometimes a decent meeting can turn into a train wreck despite the best preparation.  How?  We’re all familiar with “that guy” who commits a meeting faux pas that derails everything, so I figured I’d post a couple links to help you avoid turning into him by accident.

First, here’s a very short list of a few things to avoid at all costs.  It says it’s a “top five” list but only lists four things.  Oh well.

CNN also has a pretty decent piece with ten things that will either make you look bad during a meeting or will distract everyone else from the task at hand.  It boils down to being prepared, acting professional, and staying on topic.  Good advice in general, really.

Finally, I stumbled across an interesting role-playing activity to help meeting participants and team members to analyze their own behaviors and get them thinking about how to improve their interactions.  Activities like these can easily fall into the category of “time wasters” if they’re poorly executed, but can just as easily be valuable introductions and ice-breakers for both new and established teams.

The important thing to remember is that most people don’t want to be there, just like you.  So if you’ve been roped into a meeting that you don’t want to attend, try not to make it worse for everyone else with poor behavior.  And, as always, doing your homework beforehand and coming ready to be productive is the key to doing your part for an effective meeting.  You might not be able to make things perfect, but at least you can avoid making things worse quite easily.

by John J. Walters

Right from the get-go, I have to admit that I just made up “International Meetings Day.”  But it does seem to be true.  Yesterday was the first “official” day back at the office from the summer, a time when a lot of companies put things on hold so that people can enjoy their vacations.  And what better way to celebrate a return to productivity than a day (or even a short week) filled with unproductive meetings!

I have two theories about this “IMD” phenomenon. Theory number one goes that this week is also often times the first week back at school.  In college, this first week was known as “syllabus” week by most students, as our classes were little more than meetings with the professor to discuss the syllabus that we were all more than capable of reading ourselves.

But why read on our own when we knew the teacher was going to waste the first seminar droning on about his classroom policies and course pacing?  Everyone just got used to printing their syllabi off at the last second right before class and then waltzing in to sit, listen, be bored, and check out their new classmates.  After 4 years of that, maybe we just got in the habit of making the days after Labor Day “meeting days” — that is, time to sit, listen, be bored, and check out our new co-workers.

Of course, this situation could easily be avoided (and sometimes was, by the smarter professors) by a little preparation on the part of the teacher (the meeting creator) and the students (the meeting attendees).  Design the syllabus to be something worth the student’s time (like an assignment that would factor into their grade) and they will read it in advance, thus saving the first seminar for real productivity.  Just like with meetings — a little preparation goes a long way.

My other theory on IMD is that people are using it as one last chance to enjoy the summer’s lack of productivity.  They know they have to get back to work in earnest soon, but why not give themselves a day or so just to sit on their asses and listen to people talk about stuff beforehand?  It’s procrastination, pure and simple.

If that’s the case, and if you’re one of the people who actually has to schedule a productive meeting during this time, my advice to you is to be very clear what you expect each and every attendee to bring with them to the meeting in advance.  This way they are warned that this isn’t just a grown-up version of syllabus week, where they waddle in wearing their Hawaiian shirts and sunglass tans and listen to the boss talk about what they’re going to do over the next few months.  They need to know that they are expected to participate.

“Preparation!” is becoming my rallying cry on this website, but that doesn’t make it less important.  Every office employee is expecting to waste this time in pointless meetings just as they have in the past, and it’s your job as a meeting creator to do something about this.  So do your prep work and figure out what your meeting is all about; why it needs to be called.  If you can’t do that now then postpone it.

by John J. Walters

This post right here is an open invitation to get a free month’s trial of MeetingCaptain just for taking the time to send me an email.  I realize that only saves you five bucks, but am I to apologize because the service is reasonably priced to begin with?

Here’s the deal: we’ve been working hard over the past few months to build MeetingCaptain into something that will help people run more effective meetings.  I think it might finally be there, or at least “there enough” to have people start using it and telling me how they feel about it.

So that’s the deal.  If you register and send me a message with your username (mention this post, please), I’ll see to it that you get a free month of the paid version, which allows you to create as many meetings as you want instead of just the one that you’re allowed with the trial.  Of course, participating in meetings is always free.

What’s the catch?  The catch is that I want your opinion.  You can send me as many nasty emails as you want about the program.  Just keep clicking that “contact us” button and fire away.  I’ll respond personally, as I have nothing better to do than make sure your meetings go well.  And that’s the god’s honest.

Ok, enough shameless promotion of the beta launch.  Next week we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming, most likely with a post about effective communication as a response to last week’s post about active listening (unless I think of something more compelling).

by John J. Walters

I admit it.  The title is not clever at all, especially given that conference calls are just impersonal meetings (so I’m just stealing my own website’s motto).  But I’ve tipped my hand.  I’ve already given you posts on my two favorite meeting tricks: egg timers and talking sticks.  So what now?

I’ll tell you what now.  I complain.  And, truth be told, I don’t have much to complain about.  The vast majority of my meetings have always been in person or one-on-one phone calls.  In fact, I’ve only been involved in a handful of conference calls, and most of them have gone rather well.  So why complain?  I complain on your behalf — because I know the vast majority of conference calls suck.

Recently, I was involved in a rather large conference call with my book team and two representatives from the publishing company.  That meant that there were nine people on the phone lines at once, which initially made me nervous.  Things actually ran fairly well, much to my surprise, so for your benefit (and my own as well) I’m going to conduct a quick and dirty postmortem.

What Went Well

• We had very few instances of people talking over one another.  This, however, may be due to the fact that there were three main talkers and six main listeners.
• We stayed on topic.  With the exception of a little chit-chat in the beginning to get reacquainted (our team hasn’t been all together in the same room for over a year now), we kept it business-oriented throughout.
• We accomplished what we had set out to do.  The main purpose of the meeting was to develop a plan of attack to move forward with editing after the first round of reviews.  We did exactly that.

What Went Not-So-Well

• The meeting took an hour.  While I know a lot of people are used to hour-long phone calls being the norm in the business world, my experience dabbling in journalism and interviewing has taught me that anything over 15 minutes is pushing it, and anything over half-an-hour is problematic.
• I barely heard from most people.  And I’m not sure I even heard from everyone.  Maybe everyone opened their mouths once during the hour, but gone were the days of everyone weighing in on an issue that called for diverse opinions.
• It took us a long time to get in touch after the meeting — almost a week to get the notes emailed to everyone.  Luckily, this project is something of a labor of love for all of us, but had this been a standard work meeting we would have already forgotten everything by then.

In my search for ideas on improving conference calls, the top few search results pretty much all say the same thing.  Two articles in particular stand out, mostly because they say the same things as the others but better in some way.  But the advice can be distilled down to a very short list:

• Do your prep work and prepare/distribute an agenda in advance.
• Make sure everyone is prepared.
• Stay on topic.
• Don’t be long-winded or talk just to talk.
• Keep things as brief as possible.
• Ask people for feedback to keep them engaged (when appropriate).
• Make sure to follow up as soon as possible.

Not surprisingly, these are the same words of wisdom any experienced team lead will give you about meetings in general.  The same goes for conference calls only more so, and I humbly suggest that MeetingCaptain could help you with many of the above as it marches slowly but surely towards its beta launch.

Now all that remains is to figure out a way to solve the problem of people talking over one another, or being too shy to speak up when they don’t know who they may interrupt…

by John J. Walters

I cannot take credit for this title.  That honor belongs to Dan Saffer, who created the term “topless meetings” in 2008 to refer to meetings where laptops (and other technological distractions) are forbidden.

I know, I know.  I was a little disappointed too.  This is, after all, the internet.  Yet while you never know what you’re going to find on the high seas of the unpoliced web, I can assure you that I will be keeping the lasciviousness on this blog to a bear minimum.  Pun very much intended.

I thought it was fitting, since we talked last week about using technology to help you get your meetings in order, to talk about the flip side of the coin this week.  Technology can be a great way to help you get organized but it can also be a horrible distraction.  This is where topless meetings come in.  The goal is to remove all the distractions that come from wading into a meeting with your laptop and your cell phone.

To do this requires preparation not just on the part of the meeting creator but on the part of each attendee.  You can’t just show up, armed with all the data contained in your laptop and on the internet, expecting to just fudge it until you can catch up with the conversation and contribute something you just pulled up.  You need to know the subject backwards and forwards, much like was necessary when you took a test or gave a presentation in front of the class (back when you were in school).

Actually, I am surprised more people don’t make this standard practice.  In spite of their usefulness, laptops and cell phones have very few places in a meeting.  Sure, it’s reasonable for someone to be using a laptop for a presentation or for someone else to be taking notes (only one person need take notes in a meeting — having as many sets of individualized notes as there are attendees is unnecessary, provided you have good communication and follow-up after the meeting concludes), but aside from that the primary job of everyone else in attendance is to pay attention and contribute what they can.  Not to answer emails, not to “look” busy as they type away on their little keyboard, and definitely not to surf the web as I saw so many students doing when I was in college.

They may require some extra preparation and they may be met with some initial resistance, but topless meetings can help your team communicate better and faster if implemented properly.  Isn’t that worth it?

by John J. Walters

This is what Steve Tobak says meetings do.  Actually, the full quote from his excellent article (incidentally entitled that same thing as our parent site’s motto) is:

Meetings are how conflicts are resolved and plans are agreed upon. They are how critical strategic and operating processes are developed, managed, and to some extent, executed.

He’s definitely on to something, here.  After all, if meetings were always ineffective time-sinks where nothing of any real value happened we would have phased them out by now, much like our own bodies are slowly ridding themselves of the appendix.  But we haven’t, and unfortunately we never will.

Sure, technology may change, allowing us to update our meetings.  We’ve seen a good amount of this already — from the conference call (which allowed us to bore each other from far away) to PowerPoint (which allowed us to keep attendees awake with flashy graphics and annoying sound effects).  But the basic idea remains the same: someone thinks they have something to say or discuss so they haul a bunch of their colleagues into a room at the same time and have at it.  Wonderful.

While information technology has developed to the point that meetings nowadays could be about as interesting as the movies people paid good money to see back in the day, they usually are far from it.  Why is that?  Because leading a good meeting requires preparation and a willingness to stay on track that many people simply don’t have.

Tobak lists some short, sweet, and to-the-point rules for running and participating in effective meetings (which I won’t recopy because you can easily click here if you’re curious).  Basically, they come down to three things:

1) Be sure to have a good reason to organize or participate in a meeting; make sure everyone who will be there knows what this is before they walk in.  Be punctual and brief.  Remember that an ounce of preparation is worth a lot more when everyone is finally assembled.

2) If you’re running a meeting, make sure to stay on topic and in control.  If you’re participating in a meeting, make sure to defer to the meeting creator.  The same rules of etiquette apply here as elsewhere in the world, but are even more important as you are in a business setting.

3) The meeting doesn’t end when everyone walks out the door.  Communication about what has been decided during the meeting is absolutely crucial to ensuring it gets put into action.  Getting this information out in a timely fashion is the meeting creator’s responsibility; abiding by it is a task for everyone.

To sum it up: there are three equally important parts to a meeting.  Organization, execution, and following up.  It’s not rocket science (few things are), but it is something that takes practice.  Luckily, we live in a time when technology is always here to help us.

by John J. Walters

I don’t know if meetings have sucked since the dawn of time, but I am willing to believe it.

Legend has it that the reason we all yawn when we see someone else do it is because we have been trained by generation upon generation of tribesman to gracefully yawn when the chief started to look tired, indicating that the tribal council was concluded.  If that’s not a boring meeting, then I don’t know what is.

Then again, I am also willing to believe the opposite.  Back in the day, people just didn’t have that much going on.  They liked reading long books by authors like Dostoevsky and Jules Verne because they just had so much time and so little to do with it.  There’s only so much plowing one can do while the sun is up, and once it goes down it’s easier to crack open a thick book by the fire than try to hitch torches to your horses.

The whole reason for the “drawing room” of the Victorian age was to provide a place for men to retire after dinner and smoke long pipes and talk — in essence, to “meet.”  Not everyone had a drawing room; in fact it only the rich who could afford such a luxury.  So imagine that: people actually looked forward to meetings, and peasants fantasized about adding an extra room to their cottage so they, too, could have meetings one day.

Not so much, these days.  It’s been said that idleness is an invention of modern-day capitalism.  If this is true, it’s because we have the capacity to be so productive so fast that we can afford to spend large amounts of time eating chips and watching reality tv in our underwear, which is clearly much more fulfilling than “productivity.”  Why smoke long pipes in the drawing room when we could be doing whatever we want?  Sky-diving; internet-shopping; toilet-training; rope-skipping — anything, really, besides meeting.

The thing to keep in mind, then, is that there are about a hojillion things that everyone at every meeting everywhere would rather be doing than meeting.  Your job, as a meeting creator, is to keep them there for the absolute minimum amount of time possible while still accomplishing the tasks at hand.

How to do that?  Well, that right there is the million dollar question, and the question that I will attempt to answer in my weekly posts.  Thanks for checking in, and happy reading!