Increase meeting productivity by 700% with 4 simple tactics

You’ve just walked out of a fantastic, high energy meeting. Everybody had their creative hats on and you seemed to solve the big challenges associated with a key project. Everyone knows what they need to do and by when.

What happens next is:

●     Two of your team deliver their actions ahead of schedule; ‘Why can’t everyone be like these guys?’

●     Five of your team complete most (not all) of their actions on-time. They made a judgment call on priorities. You're mostly happy.

●     Two of your team don’t complete any actions at all; you knew they wouldn’t.

The majority of the team under-delivered. What went wrong?

The bad news is that the problem is you (not your team). The good news is it’s easy to fix and you’ll reap the rewards instantly.

Here's what happened:

The focus of the meeting was lost

It was a creative and engaging meeting, however the energy was so high that the conversation kept going off topic and the team now has 20 things to consider rather than 10.

Communication overload

In your head, the output and actions from the meeting are clear. But, you’ve made many assumptions along the way and you hope everyone else made the same assumptions too.

Hmmm, consider the complexity associated to this assumption:

• The number of problems that were discussed

• The background/context associated to the problems that were discussed

• The number of decisions that were made

• The number of actions that resulted from the decisions that were made

• The number of people in the room needing to understand all of the above

The chance of achieving a unified, global understanding is slim and it'll lead to frustration on both sides; you (the manager) feel frustrated because the employee hasn’t completed the tasks correctly, and the employee is frustrated because they thought they had completed their tasks correctly, but it turns out it’s not what the manager wanted!

Social proof

The unmotivated team members kept looking across the room and saw that no-one was taking notes. “Hmmm”, they thought, “I don’t need to make any notes either”. This is the negative side to the theory of 'social proof’ at work (https://www.psychologynoteshq.com/social-proof/).

Commitment

You think that because you’ve said your piece in the meeting, everyone now knows what to do and by when. However, because 'you're the leader' the team relies on you for guidance. They know that you run the meetings, you send the actions, you do the chasing - it’s all on you!

So what can we do?

There are a few really simple meeting tactics that will not only save you time but also help you to smash the next meeting out of the park and achieve stratospheric levels of commitment from the team.

1: Start with the end in mind

Robert Craven’s strategic methodology (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-ology-robert-craven/) states that a company should define where they want to be in the future so they can plan how to get there. The same approach can be used on a daily basis too, and it’s the key behind effective, productive meetings.

If you need to have a meeting, first define ‘why’. Write down the ‘objective’ of the meeting. Then:

• Distribute an agenda to the team ahead of the meeting (this can just be an email, nothing to verbose). The agenda should include the objective at the top.

• Start the meeting by stating ‘The objective of the meeting is…’.

During the meeting make a concerted effort to keep the conversation focused on achieving the objective. If your meeting starts to stray, acknowledge the point that’s being raised and call for it to be discussed ‘offline’.

In defining an objective and keeping the meeting focused on it, you’ll have a valuable reference point against which you can pull the meeting back in line if/when the attention starts to drift off-topic.

2: Obtain verbal commitment

At the end of the meeting ask each and every team member to state their actions and deadlines to the room. Listen to each attendee’s actions in full, and then adjust/correct if there’s a misunderstanding. It’s important that they tell you their actions (rather than you telling them). In doing so:

• You open the door for creativity and allow the team to add value to their understanding of the task(s) in hand. Because you’ve not directed actions to the team, they can now think more creatively about how to solve the associated challenges. 

• You’re able to double check that their understanding of the issue/task/action is the same as yours, giving you an opportunity to correct it if it’s not right.

• The likelihood of the action being completed has now sky-rocketed. Robert Cialdini, who literally ‘wrote the book’ on the art of influence and persuasion, states that people are (up to) 700% more likely to keep to a commitment if they’ve first said it out loud themselves. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials-ebook/dp/B002BD2UUC).

3: Obtain written commitment

After the team has agreed their actions verbally, ask them to email their actions to you immediately after the meeting. Cialdini has again found that commitment is further increased if a person writes down and shares what they are going to do before doing it. Furthermore, this saves an hour of your time by not having to write and distribute actions for 9 other people!

4: Chase

You probably do this already, but it’s now time to leverage the value you’ve obtained from tactics 1-3.

As you have the entire team’s actions sitting nicely in your inbox, which have been agreed upon both verbally and on paper, make sure you send a gentle reminder ahead of the deadline date; something along the lines of:

‘Hey Steve, just checking to see that you’re still OK to deliver {x} on Thursday’.

You’re now chasing a task that an individual has said that they will complete, written in their own words. You’re not chasing something that you’ve directed/inflicted upon them. You’ve set the team up to succeed. They are happy because they now know what is expected and are feeling motivated because they know how to do a great job.

If any of your employees are not on track with their actions, you now have a great reference point from which to start a rational conversation about ‘why’ it’s not on track.

Finally

The great thing is that whilst you’ll probably feel uncomfortable (possibly patronising) applying these four tactics on the first couple of occasions, if you’re consistent you won’t even need to ask by the time meeting number three comes around. Your team will close the meeting for you, without being prompted. You’ll have an inbox full of new actions before you even get back to your chair.

If you adopt these 4 tactics I guarantee you’ll see results after the first meeting. You’ll save yourself time, increase morale and, most importantly, your team will get more stuff done.