They say it takes a really good meeting to beat no meeting at all. In our current post-pandemic workplace environment, meetings are more onerous than ever so carefully thinking about when you should have a meeting is more important than ever. Here are some questions to ask yourself that can take your meetings from good to great. 

In-person or remote?

Consider whether a meeting needs to be in-person or remote. With Covid-19 raging, think about how to make a remote meetings as effective as in-person meetings, besides using Zoom or Google Hangouts as your the medium for real-time “face to face” meeting, it might make sense to prepare supplemental media to demo important agenda items using screen recording software, like CloudApp or Loom.

Is the meeting scope appropriate?

Another important principle for effective meetings is scope. Too big of an agenda might lead to confusion of who should do what, when. Marginal thinking is the watchword. By focusing on what should be done in the next days or weeks, your plans are less likely to be disrupted by the ground shifting under your feet before you’re able to fully execute. Smaller, short meetings that have a reasonably sized scope lead to action items that have a more easily predicted outcome. There’s a reason that communism failed—planning the next five years all at once is never a good idea.

Is a meeting really necessary?

Ask yourself whether you can do without the meeting in the first place. It’s hard to do meetings right and a meeting done wrong can put the brakes on team momentum and excitement. If you have hired stellar employees that have a bias towards action, premature meetings to talk about what they are doing is antithetical to their workflow. They would rather just go out and do it.

The marketplace is so dynamic that things can change while you plan; a strategy already enacted by a sole contributor is more robust to changing conditions. During WWII General Patton said the key to success was to never fight for the same territory twice. While you may need to pivot your execution from time to time, you are much less likely to need to do so by outhustling the competition.

Is your meeting too big?

If you’re absolutely certain that a meeting is what you need to do to get everyone on the same page, consider how the headcount is going to affect how smoothly the meeting runs.  The smaller the group, the better results you can expect. When it comes to inviting stakeholders to a meeting, apply the same principle that engineers use for data management: zero permissions. 

Zero permissions dictates that you assume that someone should have no access to data without clear justification. Think about a meeting as access to an information flow that could be destructive in the wrong hands. If someone doesn’t have a clear and compelling reason to be involved in the meeting then leave them off the invite.

Is everyone prepared to meet?

The organizer’s responsibility doesn’t begin and end with sending out an invite. Make sure invitees have a clear expectation of what they will be held accountable for coming into the meeting. Give out clear assignments of what people should do before meeting. Great meetings are front-loaded with preparation work that can be shared with others. If everyone is doing their homework in areas that they do better than anyone else, the result is an effective sharing of information. In fact, if the execution of the project isn’t dependent on this level of sharing, it might be a sign that you don’t need a meeting in the first place. 

Creating a clear agenda ahead of time is a great way to make sure you give out assignments without missing anything. There’s no worse feeling than getting into a meeting and realizing that you don’t have all the information you need to meet the meeting’s stated goals. It turns into “let’s have another meeting about this meeting” which can quickly spiral downward into regressive meetings that leave everyone doubting the competency of your organization and the value of future meetings in general. 

Send out the agenda early enough that key stakeholders can punch holes in it. You might be missing something or asking for information that can’t be delivered in time. In which case you can save yourself a follow-up meeting by pushing back the original one. The exercise of putting together an agenda helps organize your thoughts and puts a fine point on what should be within the scope of the meeting and what parts are too far out to really reasonably plan for.

Is your meeting scheduled at the right time?

What time of day have you scheduled the meeting? If you do it right around 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon when people’s sugar levels are at their lowest, don’t expect to get someone’s best work. It only takes one person zoning out to go from great to poor, and you may not even recognize that it’s happening until later. Bring snacks to a later afternoon meeting if you can’t schedule something for the morning. There’s a reason that working lunches are a thing.