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Best practices for meetings

  • Artigo

Important

This article is for the legacy Workplace Analytics app and does not reflect functionality available on the updated Viva Insights platform. Access current documentation for Viva Insights advanced insights here: advanced insights documentation.

To solve a problem or make a decision, it helps to keep the meeting audience small and the duration short. Research shows that smaller and shorter meetings enable attendees to communicate faster, come to decisions more quickly, and focus on getting the work done.

Why it matters

The condensed guide to running meetings explains a few new ideas that can help make your meetings more effective:

  • "If you want people to have the opportunity to contribute, you need to limit attendance."
  • "Social psychology research has shown that when people perform group tasks (such as brainstorming or discussing information in a meeting), they show a sizable decrease in individual effort than when they perform alone.”
  • "Research shows that there are advantages to keeping [meetings] shorter."
  • "Having everyone contribute isn’t just good for creating more effective meetings but for the participants themselves as well."

The Stop the meeting madness article explains what 182 senior managers in a range of industries said about meetings when surveyed:

  • "65 percent said meetings keep them from completing their own work."
  • "71 percent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient."
  • "64 percent said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking."
  • "62 percent said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together."

Best practices

  • Say no to meetings. See Polite ways to decline a meeting invitation and Set team meeting rules and policy for ways to say no and set meeting policy.
  • Support shortening meetings and inviting fewer people.
  • Encourage employees to use personal meeting insights to understand how they can improve their meeting habits.
  • Use Teams and OneNote to share meeting notes. Employees can share meeting notes with decisions and action items with managers as an alternative way to keep them informed.
  • Enable Manager insights to help managers identify ways to improve team behavior.
  • Regularly and openly check in with employees. Frustration, resentment, and even hopelessness are signals that people are falling back into less productive patterns. Changing protocols and behaviors takes time, and sustaining momentum requires consistent attention.
  • Assess and discuss progress around meeting habits and its impact on focus. Small, tangible wins provide something for people to celebrate, and small losses provide opportunities for learning and correction.
  • Share 6 tips for handling scheduling conflicts.
  • Require meeting agendas, with clear meeting objectives.
  • Keep meetings short, but don’t rush through important conversations either.
  • Discourage the use of devices in meetings. It's distracting for those who use the devices and those who participate in the meetings.
  • Try holding stand-up meetings. Studies show they are about 34 percent shorter than sit-down meetings, yet produce the same solutions.
  • Encourage participation in meetings. It's beneficial for creating more effective meetings and giving participants a way to be heard and considered.
  • Avoid holding a meeting just to update people. Decide if an email announcement is enough.

Change strategies

Set team meeting rules and policy

  • Take an employee survey to gather data and impressions about the organization's meeting frequency and its impact on how much work is or isn't getting done during the day.
  • Come together as a team to share everyone's feedback. It's important to process all contributions and analysis from all team members to begin the process of change.
  • Agree on a collective, personal goal based on the survey feedback. For example, declare "meeting free" periods to free up time on everyone's calendar. This increases individual focus time and productivity and reduces the spillover into personal time.
  • Set standards for when an employee can decline a meeting. Provide a meeting decline template with policy explanations that employees can use to decline meetings based on your team’s meeting rules. For example, "the meeting has no agenda" or "someone from my team is already attending the meeting."
  • Create and share your team’s list of meeting rules along with an empowering message that allows employees to say yes or no to meeting invitations they deem valuable or not to attend.

Empower your employees and say no

If you aren't necessary in a meeting, decline and provide your employee a brief explanation why. This empowers your team members to become decision makers.

Create meeting attendance checklists

Reduce the number of attendees in meetings by clearly identifying who is required and who is optional. Create and share a checklist to help employees decide who they should invite. The following is an example of a checklist and possible roles required for the meeting.

Checklist for inviting meeting attendees:

  • What decisions need to be made?
  • Can I assign each attendee a clear role in the meeting?
  • Can I reach the desired outcome if I remove an attendee?
  • Can I reduce attendees by providing an email summary?

Possible roles for meeting:

  • Key decision makers: Maria and Juan
  • Required for business context: Taylor and Omar
  • Required for budget sign-off: Kerry