Start the New Year with Some Great Meeting Tips – (some are strange, but work…)

Every company whether it is big or small has meetings. Yup you can’t escape them. It’s a time to update and refresh the team in the new week with more information. The weekly department meeting, the project status meeting and the monthly division meeting are all seen as a boring, a waste of time, and something that keeps people from getting real work done.

The Guardian mentioned a study that showed that meetings make people very unhappy at work, and that the more meetings/meeting time, the greater the negative effects. This becomes even more depressing since the overall time spent in meetings is rising in most countries, and especially managers, spend most of their work day in meetings.

Having fewer meetings is definitely the way to go in many workplaces, but eliminating all meetings is not an option in today’s team-based work environment. This means that having good meetings become essential.

So what constitutes a good meeting?

• Efficient – So stuff gets done!
• Positive and fun – So people enjoy themselves and look forward to the next meeting.
• Participative – So everyone participates equally, instead of just zoning out or faking agreement.
• Open – So people say what they really think.
• Creative – So the thinking goes beyond the usual and into new territory.[/blockquote]

BUT if we really want open, fun, creative, meetings that people actually participate in we need to go beyond the standard advice and enter into slightly-strange-land, (bear with me here). Here are five easy ways to do it.

1.  Start The Meeting Using A Positive Round

Psychological experiments have shown that the way a meeting starts, sets the tone for the whole meeting. Start the meeting with complaints, problems and mutual blame, and that’s what you’ll get.

But if you start out with something positive, the rest of the meeting is more likely to be more fun. The best way to start a meeting positively, is to ask each participant to briefly (= less than 30 seconds) share something positive. Here are some ideas:

• Name one thing you’ve accomplished since the last meeting that you’ve been proud of?
• Name a person who has helped you since the last meeting.
• Mention one thing you’re looking forward to in the coming week/month?
• What’s the funniest thing someone has told you in the last week?
• Mention something interesting you’ve learned since the last meeting.

This sets a positive tone for the rest of the meeting – and it’s also a lot more fun than opening with a list of complaints and problems.

 

2: Interrupt Regularly

 

I know you want to make the most of your meeting time – and that makes it tempting to think that “MAN, we have a long agenda today – let’s skip the breaks and get more done.” Only thing is, it doesn’t work that way.

You need to interrupt the flow of the meeting regularly. This keeps people’s minds focused and it makes the whole thing more fun and relaxed. First of all: A five-minute break every hour is not an option, it’s mandatory! You can’t have a productive meeting if half the people present are seriously in need of a restroom visit. Secondly: Every half hour, do a quick two-minute creative break of some kind. You can: Get people to stand up and stretch, have a quick rock-paper-scissor tournament, ask everyone to tell their neighbor a riddle or a joke, whatever. Make it something fun and light-hearted that activates people in some way.

Bring a kitchen timer and set it to 30 minutes, to make sure you remember the creative breaks.

3: Lose The Table

What purpose do tables really serve at a meeting, except to give you a place to put down your coffee cup and to keep your head from hitting the floor when you fall asleep?

Traditional meeting room. Note the huuuuge distance from one end to the other and the place of honor at the head of the table.

There are many advantages to table-less meetings:

• People are more free to move around, instead of being locked into one sitting position.
• Communication flows better, because you can see the entire person, not just from the chest up.
• You increase participation, because people can’t simply slump down and hide throughout the meeting.
• You can get people closer together. If you seat 20 people around a table, the distance from one end to the other is going to be huge.
• Seating people in a circle signals that everyone is equal. It’s democratic, unlike the normal meeting table, where the boss sits at the head of the table.

So instead of meeting around a table, simply put the required number of chairs in a circle with nothing in the middle. If you’re going to be looking at a lot of plans or papers, hang them on the wall and arrange the chairs in a semi-circle in front of them.

4: Stretch, Move, And Be Creative

Your body is not good at sitting still for extended periods of time. The longer you sit still, the more stiff and tired the body gets. And when the body is tired and stiff, so is the mind.

A very simple thing to do is to get people to stand up and stretch. It only takes a minute to:

1. Get everyone to stand up.
2. Bounce on your feet for 10 seconds, just to get the blood flowing.
3. Stretch your arms up towards the ceiling – as high as you can.
4. Keep your arms up and lean to the right. Hold for 10 seconds.
5. Lean to the left, hold.
6. Lean back, hold.
7. Lean forward, touch your toes.
8. Sit back down.

You can do it at the beginning of the meeting, after every break or whenever you sense that people are zoning out and losing focus.

Try this one day in a meeting, and you will discover that once you’ve stretched your body, your mind will feel fresher, more flexible and more creative.

5: Use Silence

This is probably the one thing you find in no meetings. I mean – the purpose of meetings is to talk, right. Silence kinda defeats that purpose, doesn’t it?

No. The purpose of meetings is not to talk – the purpose of meetings is to arrive at ideas, solutions, plans and decisions in such a way that:

1. The ideas are so good that they can be carried out.
2. The process that leads to the ideas is so good that people want to carry the ideas out.

Silence can be a great tool. Because while some people can think while they’re talking – most can’t.

A well-placed two-minute silent break is a great chance for people to stop and think. To figure out what the deeper issues are. To see the solution that is not immediately obvious. To find out how they feel about the issues being discussed.

Here are some ways to use it:

• When discussing an issue, present the facts without discussing solutions. Have two minutes of silence, then discuss solutions.
• If discussions become heated, and it seems like no progress is made, two minutes of silence can be a great way to cool the whole thing down.
• When a decision has been made, give people two minutes of silence to think about how they feel about this decision.

The way you do it is that at the appropriate time, you announce a two-minute silence, and you keep track of time and let people know when the two minutes have passed.

And let me warn you right away: It feels very strange the first few times. It’s funny that silence should be so threatening, but because most meetings are all about the talking, and we’ve come to think that silence is awkward.

Yes, adding these things to a meeting will take a little time out of the schedule, but I think we all know that the problem with bad meetings is not how much time we spend in them – it’s the quality of that time. It’s whether we spend that time being energized, creative and having fun – or whether we spend it wishing we could be back at our desks doing some real work.

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