Meetings are a buzz killer. Most complaints about office work are about meetings. In fact, meetings seem to be the most dreaded office activity. Potentially, even more disliked than peer reviews and evaluations. Yet, meetings continue to be an apt and necessary way to do work. Otherwise, everyone wouldn’t be so keen on organizing them. Hence, we can only derive that there must be something about meetings that is truly valuable. It’s something that, until now at least, only meetings can provide.
Meetings have been studied, and there are countless publications discussing the matter. What’s so special about meetings? It may have to do with the information exchange. Or it may well be due to the nature of the event. The physical proximity, the sheer presence of teams in the same room. It likely has to do with an interplay of the two.
Posts Tagged Under: meeting agenda
All meetings are much like performance shows where people come in and take their usual roles. There’s always someone who monopolizes the conversation and couldn’t care less about your agenda, the typical colleague who never speaks up, or the one who would literally agree to anything you say, right? That’s because each team gathers a wide variety of personalities and communication styles. So how can you encourage all attendees to engage in the conversation and contribute within a given time frame, so that when the meeting is over you have a clear outcome?
Photo by Angel Origgi on Unsplash
Instead of showing up for every meeting invitation we get, how about we try a new gimmick and decline some of the invitations? But how to choose which meeting to attend and which to avoid? I looked for the most obvious signs of an unproductive meeting and here’s what I found.
One Harvard Business Review report
