Sep 29, 2020
My Simple Meeting Policy
This is my simple meeting policy. With more virtual meetings, we need more time to recover between meetings.
To any meeting organizer, I will commit to:
- Arriving on time.
- Leaving on time.
To any meeting organizer, I need:
- An agenda in the invite.
- Proactive management of the agenda to the allotted time.
To any meeting organizer, I encourage you to:
- Shorten your meetings (25min, 50 mins).
- Start your meeting 5 mins after the hour (e.g. 9:05 rather than 9:00)
- Adopt a simple meeting policy, like this one.
- Encourage others to do the same.
Nobody likes:
- Meetings that start late.
- Meetings that overrun.
- Poorly managed meetings.
- Running between meetings.
- Meetings!
So if you have to have a meeting, please, make it simple!
Thanks so much for sharing this, Cleve! Please excuse me while I go share this with everyone who will listen 🙂
Have you ever thought about the difference between an having an agenda written in the invite, and having an objective/purpose written in the invite? For larger meetings, I like an agenda. For smaller meetings, an agenda can sometimes feel over-engineered, or even constricted—but *every* meeting should have an objective or purpose. I wonder whether expecting an agenda asks too much of smaller meetings and whether a simple “every meeting should have an explicit purpose/agenda” would lead to better outcomes. WDYT?
Thanks for stopping by Dan, and love the question.
So, big or small meetings are not really about the number of people that attend, but more the tacit knowledge held by the attendees. For example, for recurring meetings where the cast is known to each other, a simple agenda (e.g. plans, progress, and problems) works well. You need more structure for bigger meetings where there is a high risk of low outputs because the material is new, or people are new, objectives are unclear, decisions need to be made, and so on. More detailed agendas are essential here.
Either way, always have an agenda and scale it up and down (even to one-liners) based upon your understanding of what the attendees need to get what you want from the meeting.
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