🤝 What is an effective meeting?

😫 Do you have online meetings from 9 am to 6 pm?

➡ This is a sign that your company is losing productivity and has to better manage the employees' time.

It's pretty common today to see people that work remotely saying things like:

➡ I'm going to my 9th meeting today.

As the Pandemic rewrote the working culture to be more remote, many companies began to replace the physical presence at the office with unproductive meetings.

How many meetings you thought and you heard someone saying that this meeting could be an email or a message sent on Slack or Teams?

▶ Summary text from McKinsey & Company

❝New processes and untested systems allowed inefficiencies to creep in—inefficiencies that included meetings scheduled for the sake of unstructured discussion or even basic human interaction rather than for productivity. While interacting might be easier than ever, value-creating collaboration isn’t—and its quality seems to be deteriorating.❞

❝Effective meetings aren’t just about keeping ourselves from going around the bend. When meetings aren’t run well—or when there are too many of them—decision making becomes slower, and the quality of decisions suffers. According to one McKinsey survey:

• 61% of executives said that at least half the time they spent making decisions—much of it surely spent in meetings—was ineffective.

• Just 37% of respondents said their organizations’ decisions were both timely and high quality.

• And, in a different survey, 80% of executives were considering or already implementing changes in meeting structure and cadence in response to the evolution of how people worked during the pandemic.❞

❝It doesn’t have to be this way. When meetings are run well, they not only foster better decisions but also leave attendees feeling energized and motivated to carry the momentum forward independently. ❞

▶ How can leaders address the problem of time scarcity?

• Have a ‘time leadership’ budget—and a process for allocating it. When adding a project or initiative, companies should analyze how much leadership attention, guidance, and intervention each will need. In our experience, this is the best way to move toward the goal of treating leaders’ time as a finite resource—one that is as precious as a company’s financial capital.

• Consider time when you introduce organizational change. Understanding the time required to achieve goals is critical to the long-term success of any organizational change. The hours needed to manage, lead, or supervise an employee can leave managers with little time left over. Getting this balance right can be tough—having too few managers could lead them to feel overwhelmed, with more direct reports than they can manage. But having too many managers can cause redundancies and unnecessary complexity.

• Ensure that individuals routinely measure and manage their time. Time analysis exercises can yield surprising results—and can inspire time management that more closely aligns with organizational priorities. Including time-related metrics in performance reviews is another driver of behavioral change.

• Refine the principal calendar. Revisit all standing meetings and make an honest assessment of which ones are being held out of habit and which ones are genuinely useful.

• Provide high-quality administrative support. In a survey of executives on how they allocate their time, 85% of those who considered themselves effective time managers reported that they received strong support in scheduling and allocating time. Only 7% of ineffective time allocators said the same. In the case of one global chemical company, the administrative assistant of the CEO considers it her responsibility to ensure that the organization’s strategic objectives are reflected in the way she allocates the CEO’s time.

▶ What are three questions you should ask yourself before scheduling a meeting?

❝Should this even be a meeting at all?

• Recurring meetings are particularly susceptible to migration from the original purpose toward something more diffuse. Check in with stakeholders to ensure that the frequency is right (weekly meetings could be changed to monthly, perhaps), or think about whether decisions could be best made by an individual—with, of course, guidance from others.❞

❝What is this meeting for?

• A meeting’s title and its purpose are not the same. When the latter isn’t clear, meetings can seem frustrating at best and futile at worst. To help avoid this, companies can appoint a “chief of staff” for certain efforts or products. ❞

❝What is everyone’s role?

• Even if a meeting has a clear purpose, it’s of little use if there is no one present deputized to make a decision. Equally, even if it’s clear who the decider is, it’s a mistake to hold a meeting when people are unsure of participants’ roles. ❞

▶ Meeting participants can be divided into four roles:

• ❝ Decision makers: Should be the only participants with a vote, and the ones with the responsibility to decide as they see fit. Sometimes decision makers will need to “disagree and commit,” to use a phrase coined by Jeff Bezos in a 2017 letter to Amazon shareholders.

• Advisers: Give input and shape the decision. They typically have a big stake in the decision’s outcome.

• Recommenders: Conduct analyses, explore alternatives, illuminate pros and cons, and ultimately recommend a course of action to the advisers and decision makers. The more recommenders the better—for the process, not the decision meeting itself.

• Execution partners: Don’t give input in making the decision but are deeply involved in implementation. For optimal speed and clarity, execution partners should be in the room when the decision is made so that they can envision how the implementation will evolve from the decision. ❞

❝Early data from Netflix shows that the company has reduced meetings by more than 65% and that more than 85% of employees favor the approach. The goal of these meetings should be to increase awareness of the new information shared in the meeting. ❞

▶ What are some best practices for video meetings?

❝Here are some helpful tips from Karin M. Reed, author of the 2021 book Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work:

• Time: The most effective meetings are short meetings. Rather than scheduling a two-hour call with ten agenda items, cut it down to a 20-minute meeting with two agenda items. There are limits to people’s endurance and attention spans in the virtual environment.

• Participants: When determining the number of attendees for decision-making meetings, the sweet spot is five to seven. More than seven attendees in any meeting can result in an unwieldy discussion.

• Appearance: Pay attention to your appearance when hosting a videoconference. It’s not a matter of vanity—it shows respect for your conversation partner and can help you get your message across. Light your face properly: facial expressions are critical to conveying a message. And anything that takes attention away from you, whether it’s a crackly audio connection or a silly picture of Uncle Rupert in the background, will distract from your message.

• Eye contact: Look at your camera lens when you’re talking, not at your screen. This goes against our natural impulses, but eye contact is critical when you’re having a conversation. And to maintain eye contact on a video call, you need to look at your camera.

• Inclusion: Leaders should engage in proactive facilitation to ensure that everyone has the chance to say their piece and avoid monopolizing the meeting. Cold calling on people—gently, and with good intention—lets people know that it’s their time to speak. Even if someone doesn’t have anything to add, they will have felt included.

For a more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice. Also check out organizational structure–related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.❞

Articles referenced:

• Text from McKinsey & Company - https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-an-effective-meeting?stcr=5A39D7DB45BC4ECFB507CEBEA057C50A&cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hlkid=a0a9750fc5af4ad49f08dbb79701f18d&hctky=11548714&hdpid=93c263e2-c1df-4e86-bfea-02648a43f4da

• “If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done?,” January 10, 2022, Aaron De Smet, Caitlin Hewes, Mengwei Luo, J. R. Maxwell, and Patrick Simon

• “Author Talks: Karin M. Reed on virtual meetings,” April 20, 2021

• “To unlock better decision making, plan better meetings,” November 9, 2020, Aaron De Smet and Leigh Weiss

• “Want a better decision? Plan a better meeting,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 8, 2019, Aaron De Smet, Gregor Jost, and Leigh Weiss

• “Tom Peters on leading the 21st-century organization,” McKinsey Quarterly, September 1, 2014, Aaron De Smet and Suzanne Heywood

• “Making time management the organization’s priority,” McKinsey Quarterly, January 1, 2013, Frankki Bevins and Aaron De Smet