How to Have a Good Meeting

Why most meetings suck, and how to have better ones

Business man in stained glass window

I hate meetings. They are a waste of time, and I feel like they are an unavoidable, necessary evil that all professionals are doomed to suffer through.

Why is this such a common sentiment, and what can we do about it?

Why meetings suck

Meetings suck because people believe that most meetings are not an efficient use of time.

This can be true when:

  1. People are attending the meeting who do not need to attend (thus wasting their time)
  2. The meeting does not have a clear goal or outcome that is valuable enough to justify taking the participants' time
  3. The meeting is not planned, prepared for, or ran in a way that achieves the meeting's goal in an efficient way

To expand on these points: meetings are costly. They are costly in people's time and energy. The costs of a meeting increase the more people attend, and the longer the meeting runs.

There needs to be a clear and valuable outcome from the meeting to justify the costs. Every meeting should aim to achieve that outcome with as little costs (in human time and effort) as possible. Meetings that fail to do this are bad meetings.

What makes a good meeting?

A good meeting is a meeting with a clear and meaningful goal. A good meeting accomplishes this goal while being as short (in time) and as small (in number of participants) as possible. A good meeting is not pointless and is not wasteful in resources and time.

How to have a good meeting

To have a good meeting you will need to do some work before, during, and after the meeting.

Before the meeting

Before the meeting you will need to do the following:

  1. Define the goal of the meeting: Why are we meeting? What should we accomplish?
  2. Decide who should join the meeting: Bring only the people necessary to accomplish the goal.
  3. Send the agenda: what needs to be accomplished? Who is responsible for each part. List by priority.
  4. Send homework: What does each person need to do before the meeting so that it can be concluded as efficiently as possible. Minimize work done during the meeting. Minimize chances there need to be follow up meetings.
  5. Schedule the meeting: The time should be fixed. You should not go over the scheduled time.

During the meeting

A well run meeting will accomplish the goal quickly and efficiently. To accomplish this the meeting should:

  1. Have clear roles assigned for:
    1. Meeting leader who will keep the meeting on topic and on time
    2. Section leaders for specific topics
    3. Someone to take notes
  2. Keep to the topic, stay goal focused
  3. Table discussions that get off topic to be followed up on after the meeting
  4. Clear notes and minutes
    1. Write down detailed notes about what was discussed and agreed upon
    2. Write down actions
    3. Write down side topics that were tabled to be discussed later
    4. Send the notes to everyone in the meeting and those who may need to know the status and outcome of the meeting
  5. Stay on time: If the meeting is going over it is better to take some of that work offline, close through another channel, or reschedule a follow up if needed