The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance

In 2014, ineffective meetings cost US economy almost $ 1.3 trillion which is 8.3 percent of their total GDP.

By Moshiur RahmanPublished 3 years ago • Updated 3 years ago • 8 min read

A funny video below made by David Grady about bad meeting

Meetings are essential. We need meetings for communications, attachments, sharing thoughts, taking other’s opinions, coordinating and making sure that everything is taking place as planned with everybody’s equal participation.

David Grady has made a funny video below about bad meeting

But bad meetings eat up time, money and productivity. For example, in 2014, ineffective meetings cost the US economy almost $ 1.3 trillion which is 8.3 percent of their total GDP. But most of the time, leaders cannot easily get rid of conventional meetings because of not knowing better ways to deal with those or not finding any scientifically proven new techniques.

Moreover, bad meetings bring more bad meetings, resulting in a natural way in an organization. The main purpose of this book is to reduce time wasted in unnecessary meetings and remove the bad ones with the help of scientifically proven techniques.

Reasons for Too Many Bad Meetings

Firstly, It is the willingness of top leaders who overuse meetings as means to appear before their team for proving themselves active. In addition, they reinforce frequent meetings to uphold the values of employee inclusion, empowerment, engagements and so on. Actually, meetings are deemed to be the expression of these values.

Secondly, democratization has been an accepted norm in many organizations. There is no hard and fast control from the top. Employees at the bottom can participate in decision-making as well. As part of decision-making, meetings are used to listen to the voices of all employees.

Another point is that lots of unsuccessful ineffective meetings mean more meetings to deal with the problem. Likewise, the meeting culture in an organization is equally responsible. Many meetings only take place because these need to be arranged for maintaining formality without any apparent reasons.

Costs of Meeting are Really High

The general cost of meetings can be easily calculated, simply by multiplying the per hour salary of an attendee by the number of hours and a total number of attendees. For example, there are three participants attending a meeting, each of whom has an hourly salary of $50. The meeting continues for 3 hours. So the cost in terms of employee salary is 50*3*3= $450.

There are also other types of direct costs involved in terms of space, equipment and travel if there are any. Moreover, indirect costs like opportunity cost are also significant, meaning that the attendees can opt to do something better than taking part in a bad meeting.

Psychological costs cannot be ignored as well, which entails employees' suffering from a bad meeting.

David Grady: How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings

Return on Investments from Your Meetings

There is a meeting index to calculate the return of investments for your meetings. It takes into consideration the below factors,

• Meeting Design

• The Meeting Itself: Time Dynamics

• The Meeting itself: Interpersonal dynamics

• The Meeting Itself: Discussion Dynamics

• Post Meeting

At the end of the book, the index is discussed elaborately.

A Leader’s Self-awareness is Important While Conducting Meetings

Leaders have an inflated view of themselves that they can conduct meetings with maximum effectiveness. This sort of wrong self-image may spoil a meeting because this type of attitude ignores the feeling of the attendees most of the time.

To overcome this problem, Taking feedback from attendees is a good way. But in case the participants are reluctant, there must be other ways for taking feedbacks like keeping the participant’s name and identity anonymous.

The most important thing is that the leaders have to be extremely cordial about making a meeting an effective one rather than proving themselves excellent.

Another important way to solve the problem of the bad meeting is applying servant leadership in the workplace, which focuses on prioritizing other’s time and importance. Servant leaders are of givers’ mentality and they find their success in making others more successful.

Determining Meeting Time

People living in various places on the planet have different types of lifestyles and sense of time which affect a meeting duration significantly. For example, in Latin America and Middle-east, it is an accepted norm to start a meeting an hour late.

Moreover, in many organizations, it is almost a hard and fast culture to conduct an hour-long meeting whether it is necessary or not. It has been found in research that most effective meetings end in less than 51 minutes.

Another important strategy is that if a meeting is concluded ten or fifteen minutes before the stipulated time, the attendees are happy and keep a positive mental attitude towards attending the next meetings in time.

In addition, daily short meetings or hurdles are also effective for concise interactions among the attendees although there are certain specific points that require separate time for more specific discussions.

Meeting Agendas can Spoil a Meeting if not Determined Carefully

Only determining an agenda for a meeting is not enough for a successful meeting. An agenda should be fixed like achieving a goal. First, that goal needs to be fixed. Then it needs to be separated into small parts and absolute care needs to be applied while implementing each step successfully.

An important point is that there can be a specific time allotment for specific parts. Chosen attendees can be distributed specific portions and accountability must be ensured.

One thing must be remembered as well, agenda and meetings never become outdated. That is why these always need to refresh.

The Bigger the Meetings, the Greater the Chance of Being Worse

Big meetings demand more time, energy and attention from the attendees. In lots of meetings, it is seen that participants lose interest and attention both when the meetings start to get longer.

Likewise, the number of attendees must be assessed against the demand, agenda and time of the meeting. On one hand, all the necessary participants must be included and on the other hand, unnecessary ones must be excluded, considering the success and effectiveness of the meeting.

One important idea for keeping the meeting group into a manageable size is to select some representative voices. These representatives point out a specific agenda and help to stick to finishing time. Moreover, they also help to avoid unnecessary points.

Trying to Avoid Conventional Meetings Setup

Humans become habitually disinterested, lazy and stale about something conventional. That is why it is a good idea to change the meeting culture or norm frequently such as changing the sitting arrangement, presenters, timing, places and so on.

Meeting in informal places/ Photo : https://commons.wikimedia.org

Sometimes meetings can be arranged in an informal setting like in the garden while standing or walking. Walking meetings are good for three to five people maximum and it has positive health benefits. Standing meetings are good for large groups and are scientifically proven to be more effective.

Communicating Positivity from the Beginning of the Meeting

Positive or negative moods are contagious which spread very quickly among the attendees. This is why it is advisable for the experts to keep positivity in control and suppress the negative vibe as much as possible.

There are several ways to keep the attendees motivated throughout the meeting by offering snacks, playing music, telling funny jokes etc. Sometimes it is a good idea to prohibit the attendees from using their mobile phones during the meeting.

Furthermore, opening a meeting on the right root is essential. For example, acknowledging group achievements and reminding the attendees about the values of the meeting can be beneficial.

Creating Synergy in a Meeting

Creating synergy means being able to get everybody involved in order to create a collective approach rather than choosing an individual discreet one. One way to do that is incorporating silence into the meeting so that attendees can get some time to think more creatively about the topics and can contribute.

Another one is brainwriting which involves giving the attendees an opportunity to write about the agenda for a while.

Next is to give some time to read the agenda silently for contributing to the discussion. All these techniques help to create synergy or collective efforts of both the host and attendees.

Conducting Virtual Meetings

Although virtual meetings have become quite an old phenomenon, the main purpose of a meeting has not changed so much. But for a virtual meeting to be effective, there are multiple factors that play a vital role.

For example, the moderator has to play a vibrant role and generate energy among the attendees through his/ her voice as other aspects of interaction are absent such as face-to-face interaction, emotional interactions and so on.

Moreover, there is a chance of technical failure which may result in misunderstanding, miscommunications, misinterpretations and awkward flow of information etc.

Steven Rogelberg (stevenrogelberg.com), a Chancellor’s Professor of organizational science, management, and psychology at UNC Charlotte, has more than 100 publications addressing issues such as team effectiveness, leadership, engagement, and meetings at work. In the presentation below at Google, he is delivering speech about his book, The Surprising Science of Meetings regarding proven practices and techniques that help managers and employees enhance the quality of their meetings. source : Talks at Google YouTube channel

At The End

Meetings are essential to meet the daily needs of an organization. It is not possible to escape those. But avoiding bad meetings is possible by following the scientifically proven techniques mentioned above. Organizations can save a lot of money, time and energy by changing their meeting culture and arranging more effective ones.