Meetings are a big chunk of how office workers spend their time, but only 30% of meetings are seen as productive. Many of us have had coworkers who you can't get an answer out of without a meeting, so unfortunately we can't just turn most of them into an email!

Fortunately, meetings don't need to suck. Today, we're going to look at 5 simple ways you can elevate meetings that you're facilitating – and hopefully set a good example for your coworkers! ✨

📝 Assign key roles in advance.

Before the meeting, make sure you have a clear meeting facilitator, notetaker, and decider – and make sure they know their roles. You can also open the meeting by clarifying who is doing each of these roles.

These might not need to be filled by 3 separate people, but you should be deliberate about who's picking up which responsibility.

💬 What the facilitator does.

The facilitator's role is effectively to run the meeting. They are responsible for:

• making sure the agenda is followed,

• keeping topics to time,

• ensuring everyone is contributing as intended, and

• outlining any action items.

They are also responsible for diffusing potential conflict.

✨ Why someone (or an AI) should take notes.

The notetaker's role is to document the key discussion points and decisions made during the meeting. Ideally this isn't the facilitator, because it can be difficult to guide the conversation while also trying to record it.

If you're running the meeting digitally, you might be able to swap out the notetaker role for an AI notetaker so that you can focus entirely. There are a lot of free options for you to test out, including Fathom, Supernormal, and tl;dv. (But if you're at a large corporate/government with strict IT policies, you might need to check with your security team before setting this up.)

💡 Why you need a clear decider.

If the purpose of the meeting is to make a decision, you should have someone who is clearly in charge of making that decision. This might be the most senior stakeholder, the project lead, or someone else – but everyone should be aware of who gets to make the call.

⭐️ Set an agenda.

You should always have an agenda for a meeting, and it should be circulated in advance if you can. Attach one to the calendar invite (or the email) so that everyone knows what they're expected to talk about at the meeting.

The agenda set-up doesn't have to take ages! But it should cover:

• The purpose of the meeting

• Discussion topics

• Rough timings for each discussion topic

• Any documents and references

😴 The 5-minute lecture rule.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who hates going to meetings just to be lectured. (If you were just going to talk at me, maybe it should have been done asynchronously!)

The 5-minute lecture rule is that nobody is allowed to talk for more than 5 minutes straight, because otherwise it turns into a speech. If you need to provide context at any point, you should be able to do this concisely – and if you can't, then you should have prepared everyone else before the meeting.

🌈 The 4 types of meeting.

There are only 4 reasons for meeting:

• Do something together

  • eg. sketch concepts, write an article together, plan next quarter

• Decide something together

  • eg. launch or not, communications channels for release, prioritisation

• Learn something together

  • eg. book club, online training, workshop

• Bond as a group

  • eg. get to know each other, retros, fun exercise

If your meeting doesn't fit into one of the above categories, consider:

• Can you restructure it to be a clear do, decide, learn, or bond?

• Does it need to happen?

📧 Follow up immediately.

As soon as you can after the meeting, the notetaker should send out the summary of the meeting, restate any action items, and make it clear who's assigned to each one of those items.

The follow-up means that the notes aren't forgotten and the content isn't just lost in the void – your meeting had a purpose and this means that everyone can get started quickly on the next steps. If you wait too long to send out the notes and actions, people might forget what they committed to and cause delays, or those who are itchy to get started might need to ask for clarification. The meeting ends at the follow-up.

That's it for this week, but that's definitely not all you can do to make your meetings smoother. Maybe we should come back for a part 2 at some point 🤔