Meeting hygiene
If you follow through with the rule of “Meetings as the last resort, not the first option.”, you’ll reduce the number of meetings for your team in a big way. Your next task is to ensure that the meetings you actually have are productive. There are a few simple things you can do.
Answer the big questions. What’s the purpose of the meeting and what’ll happen next? This should be clear on your meeting agenda. And yes, promise yourself never to set up meetings without an agenda.
Keep the size of the meeting down. Choose the smallest group of people necessary for the meeting and eschew blanket invites. Over eight people, and your meeting is likely to be a waste of time.
Make it active. Don't waste time with presentations. Distribute the decks and videos in advance to save everyone's time. If people don’t have a reading habit, then set aside the first few minutes for people to consume the background information in silence.
Implement good decision hygiene. Guard against the anti-patterns of meetings where groups succumb to groupthink and bias cascades. Allow everyone the time to silently write their points of view about the decision before diving into an intense discussion. Determine the factors that should influence the decision and the weight-age each of them should carry. Delay intuition until you’ve allowed all the data and viewpoints to surface. Don’t let just System 1 run your meetings.
Document it for everyone else. You can use automated tools or DIY, but whatever you do, show empathy for the people who weren’t in the conversation. Make it easy for them to consume the outputs. Brevity, structure and simplicity are important characteristics of meeting minutes as well. Sending out just a meeting recording is insensitive. It’s an optional extra, but not a substitute for a succinct summary.
And if I had to add one bonus tip, that’ll be to give people the autonomy to decline meetings. This ensures that if people believe they won’t add or derive value from a meeting, they can sit it out. You build an honest feedback loop about your meetings this way.