When you mention the word meeting, some people will roll their eyes. The problem with many meetings is that they serve little or no purpose. Sometimes, a company will use a meeting to try and eliminate negative feelings about the company and its policies.
When holding a meeting, you must ensure they have a positive purpose and are designed to be short but chock full of information that will help the attendees.
You never want to hear back that the meeting could have been a simple email instead of a time-waster.
Time boxing a meeting will eliminate many of your previous issues.
There are three fantastic ways to use time boxing for meetings.
1. You can do hard or soft time box meetings. Let’s clarify the difference.
With a hard time box, you feel certain you can obtain the objective without any delays or serious interruptions.
You will use hard time boxing for your meeting if the agenda is a super tight fit, such as reviewing a new project that has to be greenlighted. Hard time boxes will be used if the agenda is action-filled.
For example, if you and your team have to physically go over a project such as the design of a new shopping center, and you have the model created by the designer, then it is hard boxed meeting.
Once you decide it will be a challenging time box, set the timer and dive in.
On the other hand, if you have doubts about your team's ability to focus and get it done on time, you would opt for a soft time box.
You could also use a soft time box if the agenda is difficult for all participants to understand, leaving room for quick questions. Once the timer ends, you can allow for a very brief windup of the meeting.
This helps if you have team members who tend to feel some anxiety over time pressures.
Another example that may help is using soft time boxing when the agenda is not stuffed, such a hard time box which leaves zero room for questions and quick 2-minute stretch breaks.
Many people use soft time boxes for meetings about what is expected from the team for the entire day, or you schedule a meeting with a newly hired team.
2. In the past, you may have done a meeting without creating any sort of agenda or list of topics to cover. For meetings to be something people do not dread, you should have more structure.
Start by creating your meeting agenda. Make a list of what you need to cover and assign a start and end time to those items. Once your agenda is complete, share it with all the people who are to attend and ask for feedback. Once that is done, you can edit and tweak your time boxes if needed.
This can happen if one team member reports that the time required to discuss point five is too short, and there will be some confusion and questions due to the topic.
3. In meetings where more than one person is speaking, you will need to give notification that each one needs to wind up quickly. You can advise the presenters beforehand on how you will do this.
Start by advising upfront that you will be cueing an end and it will make the presenter more comfortable while they are engaging people in the meeting.
Using the above processes, you will take your meetings to a new level. Gone are the days of having meetings with confusion about the topic or hitting a boredom level that puts everyone in snooze mode.
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