Don’t Return to Bad Meetings
The Great Return has begun. Here in North Carolina, mask mandates were lifted last week. Heather and I went to an in-person farewell event for a colleague last week. Many of our clients are slowly returning to their offices. We have some in-person facilitations on our calendars. It’s exciting to return to the creative sparks of in-person connections.
This moment of transition is a good time to rethink your meetings. Many organizations dedicate significant amounts of their people’s time, energy, and good thinking to meetings. Much of it is useful—yet there are lots of unproductive, dare I say useless, meetings on people’s calendars.
As we return to the office and are once again thrust into adaptation, it’s a good time to reset the meetings in your organization. Here are some questions and tools that you can use to help you craft a set of high-value organizational meetings.
Some Questions
What tools and practices did you develop to share information as your team worked remotely? Did you develop practices that do not require meeting? Which of these can be carried forward?
Which of your pre-pandemic regularly scheduled meetings can you delete? Which ones have significant value and need to be reinstituted?
How are you going to ensure that people have the time and space to be creative and productive individual contributors?
What work in your organization needs the creative and/or strategic attention of a group of people? In which meetings does this work happen? Do you need to add some new types of meetings? Are there other non-meeting ways to engage people?
Some Tools and Resources
Rethink your meetings right now with Third Space Studio’s Better Meetings e-course and e-book.
“How to Run Effective Hybrid Meetings in the Social Sector” by Mark Zitter
A “deconstructed conference” model based on participant feedback, from our colleague Nancy Bacon