[00:00:00] **Scott:** So the average employee wastes about 50 working days every year in pointless meetings. That's nearly two whole months over a career that adds up to almost two years of somebody's life, literally sat in unproductive meetings. Meetings are dreaded, time wasting. They tend to have no outcomes. I'm sure many of our listeners have been there or uh, maybe had one already today.

[00:00:26] **Andrew:** Yeah.

[00:00:27] **Scott:** And. A lot of employees feel that only 11% of meetings are actually productive. There's some scary stats

On virtual meetings. Even worse. So the average worker loses about two hours a day, 2.5 hours a day, being interrupted by virtual meetings that is impacting them from trying to do their job.

If our listeners take one thing away from today, it's, this meetings are talking about work, not doing work.

[00:00:51] **Andrew:** Oh indeed, Scott. Honestly, the number of clients that I've worked with over the years, and I used to have a client where remember I would message her in the morning, or she'd often message me quite early, and then I would reply to her. About something quite urgent it seemed. And she wouldn't reply all day and then she'd, she'd come back to me around about 5 36 and she'd say, I've literally been no exaggeration in back to back meetings all day. then she would start her work at like five. So, yeah, meetings aren't work. They, as you say, I think that's a really great phrase. They are meet, they're, they're not work, they are meetings about work. and meeting fatigue is absolutely real. I mean, if you talk to a lot of people in, in many settings, you know, people are absolutely exhausted by meetings, but we just seem, we just can't get out the habit of having meetings.

So meeting fatigue is, is real. And as you mentioned, particularly with that hybrid world, um, people are really, really tired of meetings. The interesting thing though, this is what we'll talk about in this episode, is that if you get it right, can be very enjoyable. They can be fun and they can be productive and they can be useful. And what we're gonna talk about today is why meetings go wrong and a principle or key principles, how to fix them, um, in different formats. So I think what we kick off with then, really, Scott, is. Problem. Let's start with the bad meeting, shall we? And you just said, I'm sure you've been in in many bad meetings.

You've never run a bad meeting. Of course. You, you were never

[00:02:17] **Scott:** Hopefully not,

[00:02:18] **Andrew:** bad meetings, were you?

[00:02:19] **Scott:** maybe in the early days of my career.

[00:02:22] **Andrew:** Well, apparently, according to the research, 57% of employees say wasteful meetings are the top barrier to productivity. So if you ask people, again, as, as a productivity expert, and I'll, I'll hand back over to you in a second about this, but if you ask people about why they don't get things done. One of the key reasons apart from email, which I know is one of your other, your other sort of subjects, is they'll say, I just spend so much time in meetings. So this idea of the meeting load paradox and what that means is having meetings occasionally and effectively and strategically can actually really help people. You know, they can solve problems together, they can brainstorm. opposite though is true, is that you have too many meetings, which again, I think this is a big thing that you talk about. Too many meetings get in the way productivity, often bad meetings will, we've all been in them where you've got one person or or two people who dominate a meeting. There's two voices that sort of go back and forwards across the table and hardly anybody. Uh, gets a look in and then you end up with some people who engage these two, two or three people who are engaged and the rest of the team are just sitting there bored thinking that, know, what's the point?

Why am I even here? really what I think is interesting from a sort of psychological and organizational perspective is that if you've got a sloppy meeting culture, you know, if you haven't got a sort of effective professional meeting culture, what does that say about the wider culture in your team? I think that's something that you should, um, sort of pay attention to. So going back to you then, Scott, in terms of, of meetings, you know, the pain of meetings is, is real, but online, as you mentioned, makes it even worse, doesn't it?

[00:04:01] **Scott:** Yeah, I mean it almost amplifies some of the problems around, meetings with no purpose. So, oh, let's just have a meeting for meeting's sake almost. And I think there's a, a bit of a mindset for some people it's probably subconscious actually, this, this kind of culture of, well, we need to have a meeting to, to talk about things and there's this feeling that it's actually achieving something or it's doing.

Doing work. And as you said, it's not, and certainly it's so easy now to just fire up a, a video call with somebody interrupting them basically. And then you get into technology fails. So you know how many people that, that they've made t-shirts and they, you can buy that says you're on mute where?

[00:04:40] **Andrew:** I was gonna say, I didn't hear what you said then, but No, that would've been, a very bad joke you ask.

[00:04:45] **Scott:** Yeah. You know, there's time wasted, like, oh, can you hear me? Oh, wait a minute. No, it's not working. Oh, your camera's not right. Oh, microphone's not working. Um, and meetings tend to be, you know, if you fire off a meeting and Outlook or other calendar systems, it tends to go to a default of half an hour or an hour.

[00:05:02] **Andrew:** Yes.

[00:05:02] **Scott:** people just kind of put that in without really thinking, is that the best use of the time? Do we need that amount of time? And I think. Bad meetings can actually damage the morale of the organization and the culture because as you said, if people are wasting so much of their time at work in pointless meetings, meetings with no purpose meetings that are just talking shops, meetings that finish with people thinking, why was I there?

There was no need for me to be there. We didn't achieve anything. Oh, great. We've got another one next week. , People just become frustrated and demoralized when they're already busy and stressed out and overloaded with the work they're trying to do, and meetings just get in the way of that. So I think we need to explore how we can fix this for people, how we can have,, reduced meetings that aren't necessary, but where meetings are necessary, make sure that they are effective and deliver value to people.

So how do you think we should start, Andrew? How are we gonna fix them?

[00:06:00] **Andrew:** Uh, well, I think you'd, you'd expect, and some of the things that I, I've got some core principles, and I know you've got quite a few, but you'd expect that these were common sense. Clearly common sense. Isn't that common? So there are some what seem obvious when you say them, principles of having a good meeting.

So some of the principles, I think that, um, and you've touched upon it already, the first one is, do we actually need a meeting? And I think that's the most important question to ask to improve your meetings, is do you even need one at all? Uh, so what's the meeting for? What's the purpose of the meeting?

And is the meeting the best way to solve the problem? So what's the outcome you're trying to look for? Because you think you need a meeting. So I think that's the most important question to start with. If you are gonna have a meeting. What are you going to discuss in the meeting? that sounds really obvious, but I dunno about you, but I've been to so many meetings where people just pitch up.

I, I actually had one, uh, yesterday with a client and they, as you said, they dropped a meeting in my calendar. It sounded urgent, so I accepted it and I should have said, can we get an agenda? But I didn't have much time and we just, well, we just, just talked for an hour. So having an agenda. Is really important.

And I think it goes back to the point I've just made is if you can't put together a solid agenda, you probably don't know what you want to get out of the meeting anyway, and does that mean you don't need a meeting? So having clear agendas as well and somebody sticking to that agenda and ideally. The agenda goes out to people, ideally, at least a day before, you know, 24 hours.

So people can get prepared, they can think about what they wanna say at the meeting. You don't just drop people into the meeting, particularly as you say, with those online. So you've got clarity of purpose, you've got a clear agenda, and I think then who's going to attend the meeting? Who should attend the meeting?

Not who can attend the meeting. So there's always that balance isn't there, between, know, we could have everybody on the meeting. Or just a handful of people. So that choice about who are the right people to come to this meeting, the people that can make a, you know, a contribution. The people that can sort of add value to the discussion. Should they stay for the whole meeting? Do they need to stay for the whole meeting? Do they, can they contribute in another way? So I think when you think about the meeting is. Who's gonna come to that meeting? The smaller the better. The bigger the meeting, the more people, the more conversation, the longer it takes.

So being absolutely clear on who should come to the meeting as well is, is really important. the thing to think before I ask you about your sort of ideas on this is ideally, again, going back to this, the agendas past the people 24 hours before is people should come prepared to the meeting. Now to, to help people with that is you might send around a document before the meeting starts about, you know, you've sent the agenda out and there might be some attachments, like a, a PowerPoint that people should get up to speed with or a, a document they should read. Um, even a video on YouTube. They could watch something, they can get ready for the meeting, they can get their brain working so when they turn up at the meeting, they've got something to contribute. And it's a bit like, I think it's Jeff Bezos in Amazon. you know that idea that he, I think this is true in Amazon.

I've never worked in Amazon, so I can't tell whether it's just one of these stories, but apparently in Amazon is when you start the meeting there, everybody has to read the document that the person who wants the meeting has actually prepared and they spend the first like 30 minutes. Have you heard that?

They, they spend the first 30 minutes like reading the document. And

[00:09:26] **Scott:** No, I haven't heard that one.

[00:09:27] **Andrew:** meeting properly. So I think that that's a really good tip. You may not have to go to that length, but just sending people something to think about before they start the meeting. so if you were leading a meeting, Scott, and you know, if you were somebody managing meetings, you know, what, what should a, a leader or the person running the meeting focus on, do you think in the meeting itself?

[00:09:46] **Scott:** I think leaders need to firstly respect everybody's time. And by that. One, if you've invited the right people to the meeting, as you've said, don't waste people's time, but start and finish on time as well. You know, people tend to have more than one meeting a day and it can have a knock on effect if meetings are running late and and so on.

So I used to be really strict on start and finish times to the point that if somebody was late, we wouldn't wait for them. And I've seen that. Happen quite often where people, oh, we'll just wait for so and so to arrive. And then you've got, five, 10 people sat waiting for somebody else to arrive.

And so I'd be really strict and say, we're gonna start on time and we're gonna finish on time. And also something that I found is really effective as well is, as we've said, if you've got, every meeting should have an agenda. So agenda items. Handy tip there is make those agenda items questions as well, so that it's actually a decision needs to be made at the end of every one.

But I would also use, and I did this in some quite senior meetings, use something called a time timer, which is a visual timer and allocate time to each agenda item and stick to that religiously. So there was a visual countdown, so we've got five minutes on this particular agenda item.

This is the question we need to answer. When the five minutes is up, here's the timer, we move on to the next item. That really keeps people focused. It stops the meeting descending into a big talking shop where people talk around the subject and without those agenda items framed as questions. A vague, one line about a particular subject is just gonna meander all over the place.

So keeping things stricter, time keeping things focused on the agenda, making sure that if other things come up that they are parked for the end of the meeting if there's time or. We'll have to reconvene and talk about that or take that, I don't wanna use the phrase, take that offline. One of those

[00:11:35] **Andrew:** cheesy old. Yeah.

[00:11:36] **Scott:** office bingo cliche things.

[00:11:38] **Andrew:** That's the other one.

[00:11:39] **Scott:** Yeah. Yeah. Or we can maybe do an episode on all of those,

[00:11:41] **Andrew:** right.

[00:11:42] **Scott:** you know, discuss it outside of the meeting. Discuss it every email, in a different way. 'cause there's nothing worse than somebody hijacking the whole meeting if you've got that agenda. And I think make sure that everybody is engaged and involved as well.

So think about the quieter voices in the room. So if you're facilitating the meeting, look for those people who maybe haven't spoken up, and quite often they've probably got the best ideas. They might be too shy, they might feel uncomfortable. So try and include those people and make sure that maybe at the end of every item you've summarized the decision that's been made . If anybody goes off topic, redirect back onto topic, and I think psychological safety. I know that's your thing, Andrew, but making sure that we, we enable that in meetings as well. So encourage people to challenge you as the chair or other people and say, this is a safe space for people to speak up and challenge.

We're all on the same team here. No idea is a silly idea, no question is the silly question. Encourage people to have that safety, to make sure they get the best from that time that they've got together. I'd have another rule around distraction. So make sure that people had no phones, no interruptions. If you had to take a phone call, put your phone on silent and take it outside the room. Try and keep people engaged and focus in the meeting.

Harder to do with online meetings 'cause we know people tend to do other things on the side or switch their cameras off. But certainly in physical meetings and in online meetings, encourage people to be engaged. Make the best use of that time, and if you keep it to time, then it should be a lot more successful.

[00:13:08] **Andrew:** absolutely.

[00:13:09] **Scott:** are some basic tips, but I think there's also some creative formats that you wanted to cover, Andrew, some things that people maybe haven't tried before.

[00:13:16] **Andrew:** Yeah. And, and, and I think when you've said some of the things that you, you've suggested some of the things I was suggested, they are just basic meeting hygiene things that any professional organization should have as standards and expectations should be there, you know, meeting on time. Everybody's focused, you know, we have the phones off.

Those should be the basics that we all adhere. And if you haven't got those right, I'd start with those first because that those would make a huge difference to your organization. What there are though, and this is what I want to briefly cover, is once you've got those basics nailed down, there are some other formats you might want to consider.

Now, when I share some of these, and some of these would not be relevant to everybody listening to this, some of these sort of merge into sort of the more workshop. rather than a meeting flavor, if you like. So there are, uh, different ways to have meetings or at least different ways for people to come together to achieve that outcome that you're looking for.

And there's one of them called the, uh, ask me Anything, AMAs, which you sometimes see YouTubers do, and, you know, influencers do. And the idea of the a m is, and this sounds completely contradictory to what we said before, although it doesn't have to be, is the, the meeting is run by the questions. the table or are run by the questions who are, are, are people who are in the room.

So it might be the group of leaders come together, senior people come together in a room, and then you know, one of these sort of. Town hall type meetings. the meeting is driven by the questions of the group. Now, you could have those all, you know, pre-checked and pre-agreed before the meeting starts, and that could be the agenda item if you like, or you literally get the leaders in the room and then they're just open to questions.

So that's called an ask anything type approach. another one called, which is sort of sounds similar, but it's called fishbowl. And the idea, the fishbowl meeting idea, is you have. If you like two sides, like, like a debate going on. So you might have two teams. You are arguing over a project, arguing over funding, whatever it is, and the two sides debate in the sort of fishbowl in the center, if you like, of the meeting.

It doesn't literally have to be in the middle of the room. And then other people can contribute to the debate as and when, almost like a sort of question time. If you ever watch in on the BB, C in the uk, you know the audience come in, chip in, and then the, the core people carry on with the debates. That's another format. There's another idea which is called World Cafe, which sounds a bit pretentious, but that's where. We're trying to solve something here. So what we're gonna do is you're gonna put people into little groups and your group will talk about the topic, and then we'll bring everybody back together as a, as a larger group. And you can either have each table, maybe two or three people on each table discussing the main topic or the main agenda item. Or each of the groups can discuss something separate and then we come back together as, as a main meeting. and the final one I'd suggest, and this is, and I'll sort of hand it back to you then, Scott, is that there's this idea of what's called flipped learning.

And it, it's also linked to the idea, the flipped classroom, where you get people to do the work. You know, coming up with creative ideas, solving problems outside of the meeting. then the meeting itself is to sort of discuss what's already been decided or what's already been, um, um, sort of explored in the wider team so you don't waste a lot of time sort of getting everybody up to speed. They've done the work outside of the meeting. Now just before I, I sort of ask you, Scott, what the other formats you've got, I don't wanna suggest you should have these type of different formats every single week. know, you might wanna mix one of these up every month. You know, we have a standard weekly meeting as you've suggested, and, and I've talked about, and then maybe once a month, every six weeks we try a different format. And I think what you'll find is you'll keep it fresh. You'll keep it interesting for people and you'll probably get some new ideas come out of, of those type of meetings. So have you got any other sort, other formats or ideas to make meetings more interesting and useful?

[00:17:10] **Scott:** Yeah, so I, I think just reflecting on that, as you were saying that the. A lot of meetings just default into the traditional meeting format is like, we'll just sit around a table and we'll discuss topics.

[00:17:20] **Andrew:** Yes,

[00:17:20] **Scott:** But as we said, I think for meetings to be successful, they have to have a purpose. And quite often that purpose should be solving a problem or it should be making some decisions and actually veering more into.

A workshop type format might be the best way to do that some of the ways you've suggested to actually tackle some of those problems and to get some of those solutions rather than just sitting around and talking about it and nobody having any clear direction.

[00:17:43] **Andrew:** absolutely.

[00:17:44] **Scott:** those, those formats are really good.

[00:17:45] **Andrew:** Absolutely. I think if you, and it's interesting you say that, it just made me think that if you called all your meetings workshops instead, would probably change the nature of, of those interactions

[00:17:55] **Scott:** Yeah.

[00:17:55] **Andrew:** workshops as opposed to meetings. But yeah. Have you got any other sort of, know, weird and interesting ways to make meetings more fun and useful perhaps?

[00:18:02] **Scott:** One thing that I've used quite often with developers is something called a standup, which we have talked about before, previously, which is the purpose of that is to check in on a daily basis. Very briefly. , Other people might call it huddle, but actually physically standing up. And that keeps the meeting shorter because people are meant to be a bit more uncomfortable, stood up for too long, and you go round one by one saying, here's what I'm doing, here's where I've got some challenges.

Maybe somebody can help me. And that's quite a good way to have meetings. I've seen that done virtually as well, although not everybody stands up. But again, it's just keeping that.

[00:18:37] **Andrew:** do people at home stand up if they're at their, in their home office?

[00:18:40] **Scott:** You try, then you can only see that bottom half. It doesn't really work.

[00:18:44] **Andrew:** No.

[00:18:45] **Scott:** , Other things certainly for developers, , which obviously is part of my background is hackathons. , But it doesn't have to be just about development. So thinking about solving problems creatively, presenting teams with the challenge and saying.

We're gonna focus time dedicated on this particular problem. It could be a customer problem, it could be a customer opportunity, and actually saying, right, we're gonna take time out of our normal routine. We're gonna focus on solving this one big thing, or small things. And I think what's powerful as well, and I've used this quite a lot, especially in terms of, , one-to-one time with individual staff that were reporting to me is having walking meetings.

So actually let's not sit. Opposite each other on a desk. Let's go for a walk, let's have a chat. And as we said again on previous episodes, that can make a much more approachable experience for your employees. They maybe will drop their guard a bit, share things with you that they might not feel comfortable doing so in the office, but also you get the benefits of daylight and exercise kind of wrapped into that as well.

So all that stuff is helpful as well.

Some final thoughts as well is around kind of meeting is when a, you know, we get these recurring meetings that is in the diary every fortnight and so on, and people just keep. Going with those meetings. Actually, if a meeting has run its course stop. You don't have to carry on.

Also I've had invites to meetings that have just been blank. It's just you get invited to meeting date and time. Actually, again, respect the person you're inviting to your meeting. You're asking them to give up their time. So back to that point around, do they need to be there?

If you're asking somebody to join your meeting, give them a very clear reason why you need them there, what you want them to be there for, how they can add value, how long they'll be needed. Again, it's back to that kind of good etiquette stuff.

[00:20:36] **Andrew:** This is really the sort of conclusion I think we'd like to draw for, for people listening to this, is that are part of the toolkit for an effective organization. There are other tools, you know, one-to-ones, workshops, email, all those communication methods are part of the mix. Meetings shouldn't be the default, are still very important. So as an organization, as a team, if you improve your meetings, you, you'll improve your productivity, you'll improve employee engagement, you'll improve what you do as an organization. So this is something that I think is overlooked. Because we're so, as you mentioned, so comfortable about just turning up in a room and let's just somebody start talking at the, at the front, and that's not the way that this, this works or this is not the way it should work. What we're suggesting is meetings aren't the problem. It's bad meetings are the problem, effective meetings can make such a huge difference to your organization. And really what an effective meeting is is. It's thinking about the design of that meeting. You know, what are we trying to achieve? What's the purpose? And then facilitating that meeting actively somebody taking charge, somebody managing it, not just letting it go to chance. So what I challenge people to do is to what we've talked about on this episode. Pick out one thing that you could try this week, and if you are a leader or a manager, or if you're gonna run a meeting yourself, you know, it's your responsibility to think, okay, how can I improve these meetings? just accept the status quo. Pick one thing like you've mentioned. You know, we'll have a start time and a finish time and we will be absolutely finished on time and just try that for this week and then next week maybe try sending out the agenda beforehand. And I guarantee that people will be impressed they'll actually think, you know what?

That meeting was actually pretty useful, and they'll look forward to the next one rather than dread them.

Thank you for listening to the Work Unravelled podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next one. If you'd like Andrew or me to help you or your business, whether it is for team productivity, leadership, coaching, or communication skills, our website addresses are in the show notes.

[00:22:47] **Scott:** Thanks, and until the next time.