Meetings. Some of you may cringe when you think about your meeting calendar, others may wonder what its like to have meetings. I came from an environment where meetings were prolific and having 6+ hours of meetings in a workday was not unheard of. Here’s the thing, meetings are an important part of business… they help to keep us connected. They help with communication. And they can be a great way to plan and strategize across teams or leaders. But they can also be a huge waste of time. You know that feeling of “this could have been an email”? Yeah that’s a whole other blog post!! If you aren’t conducting meetings as a regular part of your business, please keep reading. Are your meetings effective though? Not sure? Well, you should keep reading too!

WHY should we have meetings? Meetings are a critical part of making sure our leadership, our employees, and our projects and work are aligned and going in the direction we need. No one likes being in the dark, or feeling like they’re struggling, or not feeling connected to what the business is doing or where it’s going. Depending on your goal though, you may want to consider how you structure your meetings:

• Who is your audience – employees, managers, executives?
• What is your purpose – strategic, projects, issues, policy?

The gold standard of meetings, how they should be conducted, and their frequency, was really set with Patrick Lencioni when he wrote the book “Death by Meeting”. It’s a quick read and highly valuable with a good entertainment factor. He basically has four key types of meetings that are recommended and that you’ll find across the internet if you just Google it. However… hang with me here if you don’t think this applies to you, because I think there are other considerations outside of these four fundamental types that we’ll talk about. But, to start with, here’s the widely accepted format:

• Daily – focus is shared activities, project.
  • Generally quick, standing meeting, done in 5-8 minutes
• Weekly – tactical, not for issues focus
  • Typically runs 45-90 minutes
• Monthly – long term strategy review in a few areas, allows for dialogue, monitor progress
  • Time should be 2-4 hours
• Quarterly – long term strategy across entire business, with leadership, full strategic plan
  • Off site and likely all day

Here’s the thing, this model makes sense in some ways, but it may not fit necessarily to the model of your business needs… enter, small business. For example, if you own a restaurant, a daily huddle as your staff is arriving may be helpful to get everyone on board with what the specials of the day are, maybe a bathroom is out of order, your out of a certain menu item. You may not have a need for a weekly meeting but then a monthly meeting would be specifically to focus on what menus features will be coming next month to start thinking about OR to socialize feedback from your staff on because they are the ones talking directly to the customers. Talk about special promotions that are coming and that your staff and greeters can start generating excitement with customers about. But then you’d also want to consider using that time to engage your employees in areas of operations that could be done better or highlight what is going well, what they’re hearing from customers, and things like that. Then maybe that’s just a mandatory hour long meeting and not 4 hours. So in other words, it has to fit the work you do.

The key however, is CONSISTENCY. Make sure your employees know what the expectations are for these meetings, make it something predictable (i.e. the 2nd Tuesday morning of each month at 9am), and it is highly advisable that these are mandatory meetings. If you don’t keep your employees engaged and informed, they will be not be serving your customers and your business fully and you may find yourself also disconnected from your employees, your customers and/or clients.

These should be structured and intentional. Don’t meet for the sake of meeting… that’s a waste of time for both you and your employees. So while there is the gold standard I listed above, just because you don’t follow that format doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong. Just make sure it’s valuable and intentional time spent!