What strategies are you using to minimize meeting sprawl?
I like your approach because "time boxing" and even reducing meeting time makes each minute more prechious and attendees more aware of the limited time they have. This can help people to focus more and faster on the essentials - instead of irrelevant details.
My other rule is that if I get invited to a meeting for which there's no agenda, I reject the invite. I’ll also reject the invite if there's an agenda, but there's no deliverable for me. They have names for each of the line items on the agenda, so am I not needed? If they just want me there for decision making but I don't see it listed on the agenda, I reject the invite. After I started doing that, the team also adopted those rules over a period of time and it spread to the other teams as well. It’s worked out well. Now everyone has an agenda, meetings are being recorded, and folks start on time.
It's the difference between someone being in the “to” field and someone being in the “CC” field of a message. “To” definitely means that there is some action or assignment — you're expecting something from the person. “CC” means you're just trying to inform them, so it is optional.
I also used to empower all my teams to reject a meeting invite if there's no agenda. It causes a lot of consternation initially, but people get the memo. They realize that if you have to pick and choose between three meetings that you're booked for at the same time, you have to pick the one where you think you can either deliver or gain some value.
One of the things that we experimented with was no meeting Wednesdays, but that did not last long. There are still vendors to respond to, or the auditors want to have a meeting, or there’s a customer presentation. And if I'm getting involved in a presales call with a prospective customer, I can't say no that.
- Allow people to speak their minds, even (especially) if it's disagreement. This might be contradictory in the short term, but is valuable in the long term.
- Schedule meetings with a goal, state the goal at the beginning of the meeting. If the topics have been covered, conclude the meeting.
- Shelf anything that is not relevant to the topic of discussion.
- Any tasks that come out of the meeting - assign them to the right people and let them take responsibility.