Bad Meetings Start with Bad Meeting Invitations, Effective Meetings Start with…

Bad meetings cost you more than you think.

Americans sit through about 11 million meetings a day, and 50% of people find meetings unproductive.

The concrete economic costs of bad meetings are even more troubling:

• A standard manager-level meeting can cost the company more than $1,000/hour.
• One Fortune 50 company estimated $75mm in annual losses from bad meetings.
• US companies as a whole lose an estimated $37b a year from bad meetings.

And if you want to calculate the specific cost of your meetings, here’s  a useful tool.

If you only change ONE thing about how you operate within your organization, change how you handle your meetings.

How to Make Your Meetings Productive

Making a meeting highly productive isn’t heart surgery. It isn’t complicated, and it isn’t challenging. It’s simply a skill that most professionals are never taught—and it’s almost never taught to IT professionals.

For a quick primer on how to make your meetings highly productive, read the following three tactical, process-oriented articles.

• Dealing with IT’s Biggest Productivity Destroyer: Meetings [Part I ] [Part II]
• How to Make Your Weekly 1:1 Meetings (Actually) Productive. (RP)
• How to Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting (HBR)

If you take a half hour to read these three articles, you will gain a solid framework for how to host productive meetings.

However, these articles fail to go deep on one important point: to host a highly productive meeting, you have to get people to come to the meeting in the first place.

Make “Accept” Automatic

Busy executives are being told to automatically respond “Decline” to unclear meeting requests.

Executives looking for a softer approach are told to waste their time putting in legwork to clarify ambiguous meeting requests.

You don’t want to put anyone in either of these positions.

Instead, following a simple process to send meeting invitations that are as crisp, clear, and purpose-filled as the meetings you want to host:

Make it Easy to Say Yes to Your Meeting

1. If you share a calendar tool with the meeting guests, use it to proactively check each of their availability.  Don’t email them to ask availability— go ahead and pick a time and assume that they are keeping their calendar current.
2. Right before you send the meeting request, email the invited guests telling them why you’d like to setup time, and that you’ll be sending a meeting request.
3. Immediately after you send the email, send the meeting request.

Upgrading the content of the invitation.

1. Title each meeting for what it is. For example: “Status Update”, or “Workshop”, or “1:1”, or “Brainstorming”.
2. After the title, crisply state what the meeting pertains to, so the reader immediately knows what is expected of them for this meeting. (Examples:
   “Weekly Status Update: 2015 Annual Planning Process” or “Orientation to New Stakeholders: Jill and Bernard”)
3. Always include the meeting’s location in the invitation.
   If it is in the office, list the name of the room you are meeting in.
   If it is over a digital communication platform, name the platform and who is setting up the digital space.
   If it is dial-in, include the number and who is calling whom.
   1. Hint: If you are using a physical location, proactively book the space before you send the meeting invitation.
4. When possible, include an Agenda or specific Action Items in the meeting information field.
   1. If possible, also assign responsibility for each Action Item to guests, so everyone knows what they are on the line to contribute during the meeting.

After the Meeting: Extra Credit

While this doesn’t influence the invitation itself, a quick follow-up email providing a meeting recap always puts a helpful end-note on the experience. Include key decisions made within the meeting and what follows up and next steps everyone involved in the meeting is responsible for. Send this recap to the meeting’s participants, and save a copy in whatever document-sharing tool your organization uses.

Follow up, demonstrate how your meetings result in real change, and you further improve the odds you colleagues click “Accept” on every invitation you send them.