This Could Have Been an Email and Other Ways to Have Better Meetings

“Showing up in meetings is a form of face-time. ‘I’m here, so I’m being productive,’” says Rita J. King, executive vice president at Science House, a consulting firm that counts Fortune 100 companies among its clients and counsels executives to blow up their meeting mind-set.

When Ms. King audits clients’ calendars as part of her Model Meetings process, she finds parades of appointments that blur together, sometimes double and triple booked, with little to no time allotted for analysis or action.

To ensure your attendance is productive, get serious about what your contribution will be in a meeting, or what scintillating intel you’ll glean from attending. If the answers aren’t compelling, delete it from your calendar, Ms. King says. Here are five other ways to have better meetings, and fewer of them generally, in 2022.

People shouldn’t ask, “What was the point?”

Every meeting needs a clear objective. Regularly convening 40 employees to have each one spell out what they’re working on, and listen to 39 others do the same, doesn’t count. Instead, status updates should be done in one-on-one conversations, over email or in a spreadsheet.

“If they’re spending a lot of time watching meetings, it’s a fail,” says Frank Weishaupt, chief executive officer of videoconferencing device maker Owl Labs, which provides tools for interactive online meetings.

There are four basic types of meetings that managers should convene, Ms. King says. Learning meetings generate knowledge. Innovation meetings generate ideas. Commitment meetings generate decisions. And alignment meetings generate a road map.

Each type has an objective, such as solving a specific problem or generating actionable ideas. A lot of bosses skip the first three types of meetings and spend most of their time convening big groups for alignment meetings that fail to produce the intended results.

“Too many people get brought in, because the earlier steps have been skipped,” she says.

Shrink the invite list

The larger the meeting, the tougher it is to stick to an agenda and keep people engaged. Smaller meetings let workers tackle specific problems, rather than passively delivering updates. Breakout sessions where employees work in pairs often help bring a fresh perspective to a colleague’s dilemma, Ms. King says.

She suggests managers cancel most standing team meetings and get comfortable checking in with their direct reports frequently for status updates that don’t waste other workers’ time. Even more important, being the kind of boss people can level with and be honest.

“Develop the kind of relationship with people where they’re psychologically safe coming to you to say when they have a problem and need help,” she says.

Set the tone

Laying down ground rules for good behavior and moderating in meetings is the job of a great manager, whether the gatherings are fully online or hybrid, says Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s vice president of modern work. Managers should be active players in all meetings.

“We always raise our hands. We watch for cues. It makes a huge difference, because you’re establishing norms,” he said.

Companies need to train bosses to take an active lead in conducting hybrid meetings, he says, because they have the potential to be awkward, with people attending remotely often jockeying for attention. That can mean carving out special time to make sure remote employees feel included or spelling out clear rules about holding questions until the end of a presentation, he adds.

Have some casual time

Logging in to online meetings eliminates the casual conference-room chatter that can get people warmed up in the moments before a meeting begins, so it’s wise to build in a few minutes at the top of a team huddle to allow people connect more informally, says Mark Curtis, head of thought leadership at consultancy Accenture’s digital-marketing company, Accenture Interactive.

It might seem counterintuitive to allot precious minutes for casual interaction in a 30-minute meeting where a decision is being made, but it actually helps the flow of ideas.

“People want to be more than just a moving face on a screen,” he says.

Rethink participation

In the not-so-distant future, more employees might join meetings in the metaverse. A survey of 2,050 full-time U.S. workers conducted by Owl Labs found 56% of those polled were interested in using virtual reality and holograms to enhance their work-from-home experience.

A more low-tech way of ensuring everyone feels heard is to build in moments of quiet, Mr. Weishaupt says.

“There need to be pauses,” the tech CEO says. It’s the job of the host to ensure everybody, whether they are in person, remote, entry-level, executive or introverted or extroverted, has time to reflect on what’s said and a chance to participate, he adds.

Better use of the chat function can help. While it’s often employed for side conversation or a quick goodbye when someone needs to duck out early, the chat tool can provide a way for workers to weigh in without derailing a speaker, or to provide feedback in real time.

“It’s not that every person has to speak, it’s that every person has to share their viewpoint,” Ms. King says.

She suggests that meeting hosts pose a question, have participants respond to it in individual direct chats, and then summarize the answers. This method gives discretion to anyone who may be hesitant to talk in front of the whole group or type their thoughts into a chat for everybody to read in real time with their name attached.

Write to Kathryn Dill at [email protected]