Meeting Hygiene: How to Achieve Accurate Scheduling for Better Productivity

Think about the last work meeting you attended. What’s the first thing that comes to mind? How much was accomplished, or how much time was wasted? The latter often creeps into our thoughts after an inefficient and ineffective meeting.

Most people don’t enjoy spending time chatting instead of getting work done. Meetings are often a necessary evil – they keep your business running and aligned with its goals. 

You can’t fully eliminate the need to hold daily or weekly meetings. However, you can get more out of them in less time.

Meeting hygiene is all about keeping your organized discussions clean and tidy. If you’re unfamiliar with meeting hygiene standards, you’ve come to the right place.
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What is Meeting Hygiene?

Meeting hygiene is the overall organization and effectiveness of your meetings. It’s the steps you take before, during, and after getting together to discuss an issue or make a plan. Good meeting hygiene puts expectations on how to conduct meetings. It also guides how participants interact with each other.

Think of meeting hygiene as a standard operating procedure (SOP). It’s a set of established guidelines that everyone in your team can follow to ensure meetings. Hygiene improves business functions such as time management and productivity.

Why is Meeting Hygiene Important?

At first glance, meeting hygiene may seem like more hoops to jump through or a way to complicate something as simple as scheduling a meeting. Upon further inspection, the return far outweighs the investment. Not only can it lead to improved time management and productivity, but it also has the potential to indirectly increase your revenue by making business operations more efficient. 

A survey from Microsoft reported that 68% of people don’t have enough uninterrupted time to focus on tasks during the workday. What’s the number one distraction to respondents getting work done? Spending time stuck in inefficient meetings.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of having excellent scheduling and meeting hygiene:

• Clear expectations: attendees know well in advance when meetings are scheduled, how long they will last, and what will be discussed.
• Increased productivity: controlled conversations follow a set agenda and are goal-oriented, accomplishing objectives in less time.
• Higher engagement: participants are prepared ahead of time and ready to engage with salient meeting points.
• Better morale: employees spend less time in pointless meetings, and see greater results from those they attend.
• Saves time: meetings are neat, tidy, and stay on point. Managers and team members have more time for actual work. 
• Creates accountability: focused meetings lay out action items and who’s responsible. Attendees leave the meeting with a clear understanding of who’s doing what.
• Enhanced customer care services: By ensuring that meetings on customer-related strategies are well-organized and outcome-focused, teams can align more effectively on customer needs, leading to improved service delivery and increased customer satisfaction.
• Reinforce business strategies: well-organized meetings help keep everyone aligned with business goals and eliminate time spent on out-of-scope concepts.

How to Achieve Good Meeting Hygiene and Accurate Scheduling

1. Define Your Purpose

Every meeting needs a purpose or a focus. What are the reasons for scheduling a meeting? Do you need to decide on what
email tracking software to use?  Or are you trying to solve a problem like down-trending customer retention?

Focus on a primary reason for the meeting before creating it. Could the purpose be fulfilled in an email or team messaging channel? If so, stop right there and save everybody from unnecessary meeting fatigue. 

A recent report from Otter found that employees spend an average of 18 hours in over 17 meetings per week. You can trim this number down by holding only those meetings which are necessary. 

The purpose of your meeting should warrant coming together at a scheduled time. If the aim can be accomplished through other means, pick a less intrusive communication channel to solve the problem.
 

2.  Write a Meeting Agenda

Have you ever been to a meeting without an agenda? How’d that go? We’d venture to guess it had lots of pointless chit-chat, socializing, and tangents leading nowhere. 

A meeting agenda outlines exactly what will be discussed and for how long. You should send this out ahead of time so everyone knows what to expect. They’ll also be prepared with their own relevant talking points. 

Include the following in your meeting agenda:

• Clear objectives.
• Topics to be discussed.
• Who’s facilitating the meeting.
• Desired outcomes.
• What participant input is expected.
• Questions and concerns open to discussion.
• Decisions to be made and tasks to assign.
• Time allocated for each topic and action item.
• Where to send questions ahead of time.
• When and where the meeting will be held.
• RSVP details.

3. Send Reports Out in Advance

You’ve just spent the time to create a meeting agenda. It can help you stay on track during the event. You’ll get much more out of an agenda if you send it to attendees in advance.  

An agenda is the bare minimum. How many meetings have you attended that discussed one or more reports during a presentation? Wouldn’t it be nice to have slides or data ahead of time?  

For example, let’s say your meeting is about increasing lead generation for the next quarter. Send out data from the past year on the performance of your current lead-gen strategy. Also, include any relevant metrics from your sales pipeline that will be discussed.  

With information ahead of time, meeting participants will be more engaged and prepared to bring useful solutions to the table. 

You can use a meeting scheduling platform like TIMIFY to build collaborative calendars. It also helps you manage meeting equipment, huddle rooms, and other resources. 

Hiring a UX designer can be instrumental in customizing these platforms to fit the specific needs of your team, enhancing the overall user experience and making it more intuitive and effective for managing meetings.

4. Choose a Meeting Facilitator

A meeting facilitator conducts the meeting according to the agenda. They keep discussions timely and relevant. As the designated event leader, they ensure the meeting starts and finishes on time.  

It can be tempting to choose a facilitator who is a subject matter expert on the primary topic or purpose of the meeting, such as a member of the Sales team for a meeting about revenue generation. This is a mistake, however. It’s not expert knowledge of the problem that is required.  

A facilitator needs the skills to run an efficient meeting that promotes collaboration and stays focused. They must be able to mediate sticky situations when participants vehemently disagree. 

Designate a meeting facilitator with the following soft skills:

• Active listening.
• Verbal and non-verbal communication.
• Preparation.
• Time management.
• Emotional intelligence.
• Inclusivity.
• Conflict resolution.
• Attention to detail.

5. Remove Distractions

Your chances of a meeting finishing on time increase if you eliminate distractions. Create a focused meeting environment by booking the appropriate room for the number of people participating. You want a room that prevents the influence of outside stimuli. 

For example, many organizations love offices full of glass-paned rooms. Guess what? If someone walks by during a meeting then everyone’s gaze will be drawn to whoever is passing through. Avoid these types of meeting rooms like the plague.   

What about if remote team members are attending? Ensure you have the right equipment to host video or conference call services. 

Speaking of remote, Pew Research found that 35% of employees are fully remote while 41% are working remotely at least some of the time.  

Here are some ways to remove distractions from remote attendees during video conferences and virtual meetings:

• Assign a meeting administrator to manage virtual rooms and user privileges.
• Mute everyone’s microphone except the person speaking.
• Use meeting software with built-in noise reduction.
• Ensure video participants have clean, minimal backgrounds or use virtual backgrounds to reduce visual distractions. 

6. Focus on Getting Things Done

All of us have sat through meetings that passed through a circuitous and seemingly infinite round of updates. Each person represents a department and explains any progress made and the current state or situation.

Hold on a minute, didn’t we just say to forgo meetings that could be done by email or something like a project management app? 

Don’t make meeting participants endure a lengthy round of updates. That is not (and shouldn’t be) the purpose of your scheduled meeting. Everyone’s time will be used more efficiently if solutions and actions are the focus of the discussion. 

In other words, it’s about the collaborative output of the meeting and not unrelated input such as departmental updates. Set the tone for a productive meeting with your defined meeting agenda and well-instructed, skilled facilitator.

7. Summarize Action Items and Follow-up

Part of good meeting hygiene, regardless of the type of meeting, is to ensure every attendee walks away with a clear understanding. Allot for a conclusion time at the end of the meeting in your agenda. Use this time to summarize any decisions made. Identify assignments and responsibilities.

This last phase of an effective meeting helps everyone to comprehend the next steps to be taken. Before the meeting commences, you also want to reiterate how the management team will follow up on each action point. 

A meeting summary also increases accountability and transparency across the organization. 

Hygiene Best Practices For Effective Meetings

We’ve laid out the basic steps to improve the hygiene of your future meetings. There’s more you can do to get the most out of every scheduled discussion. 

Let’s examine some meeting hygiene tips.

1.     Invite the Right People

Avoid over-inviting for scheduled meetings. Your backend developer has more than enough on their plate – don’t pull them into meetings they don’t need to attend. They’ll appreciate fewer meeting invites, and you’ll be able to boost employee productivity.  Involve only the stakeholders that are critical to your objectives.  

You can also decrease attendance by making as many invites optional as possible. Promote a company culture where it’s acceptable to decline meetings. Sometimes people are too busy. If attendance isn’t absolutely mandatory, set them free. 

Downsizing your meeting numbers also improves hygiene. There will be more breathing space for attendees to engage and participate. Discussions will also be more focused, and less likely to go off the rails.

2.     Use a Timekeeper

The meeting chair or facilitator has plenty to do with keeping the meeting succinct and on track. They don’t always have the bandwidth to keep an eye on the clock.  

There's a simple fix to this problem. Designate a meeting timekeeper. The timekeeper has a relatively easy job. Keep an eye on the clock to ensure the meeting sticks to the timeline in the stated agenda. 

Timekeepers need the self-assurance to kindly nudge the facilitator when an item is going over time. 

3.    Keep Minutes Minimal

Your meeting should focus on its objectives. Likewise, keep meeting minutes brief but with purpose. Keep minutes following the outlined agenda. Avoid any waffling or unrelated discussions. Slowing down to document such wandering discussions only detracts from the meeting objectives.

The key to optimal minutes recording is to include the who, what, and when for topics and action items. Anything else written down is excess. Stick to this basic principle, and meeting minutes won’t impact your hygiene. 

4.    Set Clear Start and Finish Times

It may be obvious, but always have a clear start and finish time for every meeting you schedule. Even with an impromptu meeting like a huddle, let everyone know the expected runtime. Follow your item list and stick to that schedule.  

No one likes to stare at the clock while being spoken at as a meeting runs over time. Finishing your meetings on time increases employee morale. It also sets expectations that meetings will be concise and effective, increasing participation and engagement.

One of the keys to finishing on time is to start on time. It’s up to the facilitator to be prepared to launch the meeting as scheduled. It’s best practice if they get to the room 10-15 minutes early to make sure everything is good to go. Likewise, they should set up a virtual meeting room so it’s ready to host on time.

5.   Encourage Active Listening

Meetings are more productive when everyone pays attention. Promote active listening as part of your company culture with onboarding and training materials. Managers should lead by example.

Here are some of the characteristics of active listening:

• Sat upright, maintaining eye contact with the speaker.
• Positive non-verbal cues such as head nodding.
• Verbal affirmations (when appropriate) such as “I understand.”
• Wait until it’s your turn to speak.
• Summarise what’s stated and ask clarifying questions.
• Put away distractions like your mobile phone.
• Focus on the content of the message. 

Active listening ensures that meetings are not just heard, but understood, reducing the likelihood of miscommunication. This principle is also crucial in online training environments, where engagement directly influences learning outcomes. To effectively adapt these practices to virtual settings, exploring specific tips for building an online training program can be invaluable.

6.    Keep Meetings Quick

Excellent meeting hygiene is about hosting meetings clean enough to make a kitchen porter envious. Always keep meetings as concise as you can. There’s no perfect amount of time. Optimal meeting length always depends on the purpose, agenda, and how many people are involved.  

For your team, however, shorter is almost always better. People’s time is valuable, and attention spans are fleeting. Try not to block up a full hour. In most instances, you should be able to get everything done in 45 minutes.

Improve Your Meeting Hygiene and Raise Productivity

Meeting hygiene doesn’t require monotonous, repetitive tasks like cleaning the office. It’s more about setting up a framework for success and changing the mindset of participants. 

Follow the steps and best practices in this guide and you’ll be running snappy, productive meetings. Your team will stop dreading meetings. Instead, they’ll embrace them as effective ways to solve problems and get things done.