{"id":39945,"date":"2020-04-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newrcblog.wpengine.com\/effective-meetings-6-strategies-from-todays-top-companies\/"},"modified":"2023-01-18T03:34:13","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T11:34:13","slug":"effective-meetings-6-strategies-from-todays-top-companies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/us\/en\/blog\/effective-meetings-6-strategies-from-todays-top-companies\/","title":{"rendered":"Effective meetings: 6 strategies from\u00a0today\u2019s top companies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pretend you\u2019re called into a project debriefing in the middle of your day. You enter the meeting room, and several things are going on: two colleagues chatting about weekend plans, three colleagues working on laptops, and the meeting host is late. When the meeting starts, the host announces that the project has been pushed back a month.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then the dreaded happens: some of the participants start chatting about projects that don\u2019t apply to half of the room. Now you\u2019re stuck listening to conversations that are irrelevant to you, and you\u2019re thinking about how your to-do list is piling up by the minute. Sound familiar?<\/span><\/p>\n

Too many meetings are productivity black holes that fail to deliver tangible results. A major challenge for organizations is perfecting meetings to minimize friction and meet business objectives. The question becomes, how does your organization do this?<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of the largest organizations in the world have implemented strategies (some more peculiar than others) to master their meetings. Let\u2019s see what lessons we can learn from them.<\/span><\/p>\n

1. Amazon: Start meetings with 30 minutes of silent reading<\/b><\/h3>\n

Every leadership meeting at Amazon starts with a <\/span>30-minute silent reading<\/span><\/a> session where attendees all read through a memo written by the host. It might sound absurd, but it\u2019s one of the fundamental changes to meetings at Amazon that Jeff Bezos credits as \u201cprobably the smartest thing we ever did.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea is that participants (especially executives) don\u2019t always have time to debrief before a meeting and often go in blind. So instead of bluffing their way through meetings, participants can take the time to understand the context of them. This practice makes for much more engaged attendees and, ultimately, highly productive conversations.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jeff Bezos<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

“We read those memos, silently, during the meeting. It’s like a study hall. Everybody sits around the table, and we read silently, for usually about half an hour, however long it takes us to read the document. And then we discuss it.”\u00a0<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

2. Apple: Keep meetings between just five and eight participants<\/b><\/h3>\n

Studies like <\/span>this one<\/span><\/a> by the <\/span>Harvard Business Review<\/span><\/i> consistently show that meetings are most productive when they\u2019re kept to <\/span>under eight participants<\/b>\u2014and Steve Jobs was adamant in <\/span>keeping it that way at Apple<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Jobs, every participant in a meeting is critical\u2014if someone new joined a meeting, they were either deemed essential or asked to leave. This cutthroat approach nurtured quality thinking and ensured that the most creative minds were always on the same page.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meetings with too many participants run several risks, including:<\/span><\/p>\n