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Do You Run Bad Meetings?

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I have always fervently believed that the best meeting is no meeting at all. Sometimes – very occasionally – meetings are truly necessary, but most of the time they are huge time-wasters for everyone involved.

And, worse still, meetings are the very worst kind of time-waster in that they involve multiple people and give the participants the illusion of “doing work.”

But meetings almost never involve the type of work that truly matters at your business (namely, increasing revenue, improving the experience for your current customers, or hammering out systems that save you real time and/or money).

The next time you’re tempted to add a meeting to everyone’s calendars, keep the following 8 guidelines in mind:

1. Be mindful of the real time expenditure. If you schedule a one-hour meeting for eight people, you are devoting eight total hours of your company’s time to it – an entire business day. What you’re planning to cover may in fact be worth it – but it may not.

2. Watch out for “but it’s what we’ve always done!” thinking. Just because you’ve always had, say, a one-hour weekly staff meeting doesn’t mean you need to continue to do so.

Is there a solid reason, other than tradition, to continue having it? Would a group email serve just as well? Or could you have the meeting just once a month –  or even once every other month – instead of once a week? Is it possible that maybe the meeting doesn’t need to happen at all?

3. Limit the number of participants. In general, there are just a few key people who truly need to be at any given meeting; the other attendees are there on an FYI basis. If someone can be adequately filled in after the fact, do that instead and let them off the meeting hook.

4. Beware of meeting creep. Meetings, like almost everything else in life, will expand to fill the time allotted. If you schedule a one-hour meeting, it will invariably take an hour and then some. Try cutting it down to half an hour – and get ruthless about both starting and ending on time. You’ll be surprised how much you can fit in when you’re watching the clock.

5. Have a clear, written agenda – and stick to it. It’s amazing how many meetings are scheduled “just because,” with no clear sense of what they’re meant to convey or accomplish. The person calling the meeting should also be in charge of providing a written agenda to all participants in advance, and making sure that people don’t get off topic.

6. Establish next steps. The last few minutes of any meeting should be devoted to clarifying next steps and nailing down who’s doing what, when. If there are no actionable next steps, that’s a meeting fail.

7.  Ditch the minutes. Unless you’re required to keep minutes of a given meeting for legal or other reasons, don’t bother. Hold individual participants accountable for writing down the parts of the meeting that directly affect them.

8. Remember that meetings are not bonding time. There’s always a temptation to hold meetings for the purpose of “touching base” or creating a sense of group cohesion. But most of the time, meetings are not the best vehicle for this. Have an occasional staff dinner or fun weekend activity offsite (make these optional, or paid time if they’re mandatory) if you want people to bond; just don’t frame it under the guise of a meeting. Your team will thank you for it.

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Don’t Be Like Starbucks

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I was recently traveling for work and woke up far earlier than usual – I think it was the novelty of my subconscious not constantly monitoring for the sounds of my children in distress due to nightmares, nosebleeds, or other nocturnal crises.

So I packed up my work, headed to the nearest Starbucks, and settled down with my latte in an unobtrusive corner to hang out until daylight arrived.

I was right near the counter, and I saw a lot of regulars coming in over the course of the next few hours. Apparently some change had been made to the store layout the previous night, after closing (which was completely lost on me, of course, as I’d never been to that particular Starbucks before).

One by one, the regulars came in and gave their orders to the barista. Many of them also mentioned something to the effect of, “So you guys made some changes here, I see!” or “Hey, Gene – new layout looks good.”

And every single time, the barista visibly winced and said, “It was news to me – I didn’t know we were doing this until I came in this morning and it was a done deal. I’m the store manager…you think they would have told me.”

It was clearly a sore spot – and why shouldn’t it be? This man was, as far as I could tell, a longtime employee (and store manager) who had both pride and a sense of ownership in his work – exactly what you want from your employees. He comes in one morning to find everything in his store rearranged, with no notice, and it feels like a slap in the face.

I don’t think the slight was deliberate – it was probably more a case of someone thinking, “Well, this won’t directly affect anything Gene does, so we don’t need to worry about looping him in” (if in fact Gene was considered at all). But it stung nonetheless.

Whenever you make changes at your organization, be they large or small, be sure to consider the feelings of your employees. Overcommunication is far better than no communication – especially if you want your team members to feel highly invested in what they do. And, trust me, you do.

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Great Customer Service: Easier Than You Might Think

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My summer job during high school and college was working in the ticket office for a sightseeing boat, the m/s Mount Washington, that cruises around New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee.*

We got, as you might expect, some interesting questions from the happy vacationers we saw every day:

  • “When does the boat get to the top of the mountain?” (um, you know it’s a boat, right?)
  • “When do we pass by the Kennedy Compound? (Hyannis Port is on the ocean, not a lake, and in another state – Massachusetts – to boot.)
  • “Where’s the scenery?” (Someone must have told him there would be scenery; I think he may have been expecting the painted backdrops you see in plays. “Sir,” I replied grandly, spreading my arms wide to encompass the lake, the boardwalk, and the arcade across the street, “it’s all around us.”)

My favorite customer service experience involved a handwritten letter to the ticket office. The letter was from a lifelong Mount Washington devotee who had honeymooned at the lake some 30 years earlier. During that trip, he and his new bride had purchased matching “Mount Washington” mugs at the dockside gift shop.

Tragically, Mildred had recently dropped her mug on the kitchen floor, where it had shattered into a million little pieces. Harold had enclosed a Polaroid of the surviving mug (dark blue, ceramic, unassuming). Might we be able to send him a replacement for its fallen mate? He’d be willing to pay any price.

Somehow, the plight of the missing mug got delegated to me. I wasn’t sure of the best way to get payment from Harold. He’d provided only a mailing address and no phone number (this was back in the pre-email, pre-internet, pre-PayPal world) – and of course the mug in question had long since fallen out of production.

I decided the easiest course of action was to buy two new matching mugs for Harold (using my employee discount at the gift shop) and simply send them to him on my dime “compliments of the Mount Washington staff.” Harold and Mildred quickly responded via return mail and could not have been more pleased; you would have thought I’d sent them the crown jewels.

The experience taught me that sometimes the “official” thing to do (my boss wanted me to chase down Harold’s credit card number and get a firm estimate of both mug costs and shipping costs before sending Harold a written invoice) isn’t the right thing to do when it comes to making your customers happy.

Empower your people, within reasonable limits, to do just that. Your employees will feel engaged and trusted. Your customers will be delighted. And your company will become known as one that cares and overdelivers. Win-win-win.

Going the extra mile often requires minimal cost and effort but means a great deal to someone else. Besides, it just plain feels good. All these years later, Harold has surely forgotten the circumstances surrounding his “new” matched set of Mount Washington mugs. But I haven’t. And I still smile when I think of him and Mildred sitting down to coffee each morning.

*Yes, Lake Winnipesaukee is a real lake. And no, the 1991 Bill Murray movie “What About Bob?” was not filmed anywhere near it.

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