How To Design Meetings That Your Team Will Enjoy and Attend

There is a lot of advice on how to run efficient and productive meetings. While it’s true that leading a focused, deliberate conversation leads to success and productivity for these events, what about delivering a quality experience for the participant?

What is quality experience? I see a quality experience for a meeting when individuals leave the session feeling connected, valuable and fulfilled.

How can one accomplish that? I will share a few tips on my takes that I have learned from experience attending meetings at different organizations.

1. Work hard at being present in the meeting. Prepare yourself to give your attention during the meeting entirely. Whether doing some pre-read, listing a few questions to help facilitate engagement and discussion, or thinking about how to conduct the meeting and get everyone connected and involved, it is a big part of a successful meeting.
2. Preparation for the meeting allows you to relax when leading the meeting and pay more attention to “reading the room.”
3. Ask your team members for feedback, ask them to reflect on their best team experience, and answer the question of what does it mean to be in a powerful group? Once you elicit answers, that should give you an indication of different views from the group regarding their meeting quality and experience. This will open an opportunity for improvement and enhancement in the future and eliminate the “it’s always been done that way” response. People resist change; however, the result will surprise you once you invite them to provide feedback.
4. Demonstrate empathy. People associate attention with caring — your attention matters. Observe, listen, ask thoughtful questions, and avoid distractions and multitasking. Empathy is a learned skill that can be practiced by setting aside distractions and listening to someone. Meetings can be your primary place to hone this skill.
5. Set up and manage conversations. Ask the group permission to deliberately manage the discussions. It’s essential to establish some guidelines for distraction and participation.
6. Include enough time for each topic to allow for board participation. This means including fewer agenda items to allow more time for the issues.
7. Slow down the conversation to include everyone. Social turn-taking is excellent as it gives you a sense of who has or hasn’t talked and if the conversation is controlled or dominated by one or more people. You can model it as an inclusive style of conversation. You don’t have to set it up as a rule. Call on people gently and strategically.
8. Check-in with people at specific times. Begin each meeting with a question: “Does anyone have anything to say or ask before we begin?” Ask it deliberately to show that this conversation matters to you. And then wait. Pausing conveys that you’re not interested in getting to someplace other than right here, right now — that this conversation matters. Don’t spoil your pauses by making remarks about the lack of response or slow response. People often need a few moments to reflect, find something to say, and think about the best way to express it. Just wait. Once people realize that you are willing to pause, they’ll become more aware, and when they have a question, they won’t worry that they are slowing down the meeting.
9. If your group is coming together for the first time, consider an icebreaker to start the meeting to help remove any awkwardness in the air and to provide the group with the feeling of getting to know each other a bit more.

In short, high-quality conversations with broad participation allows people to get to know each other in ways that lead to friendship and collaboration. It’s the act of being with other people in an attentive, caring manner that helps us feel that we are all in this together. Crafting a quality experience in your meetings takes time, but it’s worth it.