Kill Bad Meetings: Cut 50% of Your Meetings to Transform Your Culture, Improve Collaboration, and Accelerate Decisions (Kevan Hall; Alan Hall, 2017)

Review: Besides having all facts, statistics and consequences of too many meetings, it also talks about how to conduct effective meetings when they have to. Rated: 8.5/10

• Half of the content is not relevant, 20% of the participants should not be there, 40% of meeting time sharing information that can be delivered outside, meeting often failed to deliver
• Managerials and professionals spent 2 days per week in meeting, an organisation collectively spend 15% of their time in meeting, and only half of the content is relevant and necessary to do their jobs
• Cost consequences: salary costs of attendees, salary costs of preparation and travel expenses involved in running the meeting; indirect costs: lost productivity, too much internal focus, delays to delivery, slow decision-making ineffective collaboration, people hate it
• Creating bad culture; too much information and too many people = slow consensus and heavily rely on face-to-face
• Attend meetings only when: your expertise is needed, live synchronous, sensitive or negotiation, clear outcome, right attendees, high relevance, role is not just to listen, not one-to-one setting, cannot be settled through email
• Topics that do not need meeting: broadcast of information, status updates, individual action reviews, detailed discussions
• Meetings are okay when: strategy development, succession and people learning, common learning, community and relationship building, evaluation of high potentials, communication strategy
• Unhelpful participants: unnecessary attendee (challenge them), only partial (attend their topic only), stand-ins (evaluate if is the right person), multitaskers (draw their attention)
• Design OPPT meetings: Outcome, Process, Participation, Timing
• Why meet: Who is there, collective, tasks, specific, unnecessary topic, interactions, outcomes and actions, (important) how will we know when we have finished
• Star = broadcast, spaghetti = discussion
• Problems with meetings: did other work, checked or did email, surfed the web, daydreamed
• Encourage participation: focus on audience, ask for feedback and opinion after each process, keep group small encourage early participation, involve people in the material, engage all senses, make room layout match the process of the meeting
• Engagement tools: ask questions by name, polling, voting, subgroups, screen sharing, handover control, take regular breaks, enable questions, use material, limit audience size, integrate other media
• Plan each participant’s activity for that meeting
• Decision process: boss alone, collegiate (consult only but still boss decide), empowered individual, collective
• High-context: tactful but indirect; low-context: quick, direct but may offend people
• Factors to watch out for during meeting: pace, clarity, vocabulary, humour, inclusive, breaks
• Improvements: worth your time, specific improvement area, outcome met, right participants, time management, relevance, participations, star or spaghetti, minutes, type of decision, review of previous improvement