Avoid These 5 Meeting Mistakes

Avoid These 5 Meeting Mistakes

August 11, 2014

Yesterday I had meetings all day. And I mean all day. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, but because some took longer than planned one ran into the other and I found myself rushing between meeting rooms trying to catch up some time, which of course I couldn’t.

The disadvantage of having meetings all day, I’ve found, is that you don’t actually have any time to do any real work! You take away a list of actions from each meeting but you can’t fit in managing to do any of them because you are so busy attending the next meeting and picking up yet more actions to do at some point in the future when you aren’t in another meeting!

Poorly run meetings are the most common cause of this kind of meeting overload and the stress it causes, and that was certainly the case for me yesterday. I saw all 5 of these meeting mistakes on the same day – which ones are you guilty of?

1. Poor Technology

If you are using collaboration software then make sure you know how it works! It wastes a lot of time for your attendees if you have to use the first 15 minutes of the meeting making sure that everyone has audio and can see the right screens, or that they have copies of the presentation materials.

Upload documentation to an online document storage system before the meeting starts and if you are worried about people in other buildings not being able to access the meeting then do a technical run through with them in advance. It will only take 5 minutes and it will give them the confidence they need to join the meeting on time on the day.

2. No Agenda

What are you talking about in this meeting? Several of my meetings yesterday didn’t have agendas. I arrived and I wasn’t sure why I was there or what the purpose was, but because they had sounded important I had decided I needed to be in the room. Big mistake!

Not having an agenda means that your attendees can’t plan properly so they don’t know what subjects to read up on or what status updates to bring along. This means that you can rarely make decisions in the meeting as people don’t have the right information and you have to meet again. What a waste of time!

3. Starting Late

“Let’s just wait for So-and-so,” is something I never like to hear at the beginning of the meeting. For a start, So-and-so should have had the courtesy to turn up on time like everyone else. And the meeting organizer should be respectful of everyone else’s time and not delay the meeting kick off.

Having said that, it’s polite to wait a minute or so, or maybe longer if everyone agrees and you definitely know that the missing person is on their way. People do get caught up in traffic or drop their papers on the way to the meeting room and they may be a little late. But I would suggest starting if you’ve waited 5 minutes and there’s no sign that the missing person is going to show at all.

 4. Inviting The Wrong Attendees

In one of my meetings we were discussing the marketing plans for a new product. The project team had lots of great ideas. But there was one flaw – there was no one from the Marketing department in the room. Surely someone should have invited them? After all, they are the marketing experts and would be doing most of the work.

As a result, while we brainstormed some good ideas we couldn’t make any final decisions or draw up an action plan because the wrong people were in the room. The project manager had to take away an action to follow up with the Marketing team representative and then report back via email. We decided this would be better in the first instance than calling yet another meeting with everyone plus Marketing to go through it all again. But it would have been even better if the project manager had got the right people there to begin with.

5. Inappropriate Location

My final meeting of the day was at a building I hadn’t been to before, and the project manager who had arranged it had not sent any directions. So I had to ring up, find out where it was, make my travel plans (luckily it wasn’t far) and then work out how long it would take to get there. Everyone else who hadn’t been to that venue before had to do the same thing. All that time could have been saved if the project manager, who knew the location well, had simply sent a couple of lines of instructions about how to get there and where to park.

When I did arrive, I had to pull a chair from another meeting room and perch at the corner of a desk. The room was way too small for everyone who had been invited. All in all, the location of the meeting was not appropriate for what we were trying to do, and the lack of directions just made me feel worse about the whole thing.

That would have been so easy to get right – choose a venue that is suitable for the meeting. If you need a projector, make sure there is a big blank wall or a screen. If you need flip charts, get them in the room with enough space to write on them and for people to move around. And send out directions if you need to!

Meetings are one of the top tools that project managers use to keep the project moving along. They are great for letting everyone know the current project status and to make decisions about what needs to happen next. But run badly, meetings can kill productivity and really demotivate the people who are attending. Fixing these 5 problems is one way to make your meetings better. What else can you do? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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