Making Meetings Matter | Issue #26
In the latest bulletin, we look at how to make sure your meetings add value, share a free management skills scan and more.
Welcome to the latest Leadership Bulletin.
I hope that 2023 has started well for you, your team and your organisation. What’s more, I hope these bulletins will play a small part in helping make 2023 a year of smart management, professional development and growth.
So let’s begin. We start this week’s bulletin with skills…
DO YOU HAVE THE MANAGEMENT SKILLS TO THRIVE?
It’s an important question - and we've created the Edfolio Management Scorecard to help you answer it! Over a series of multiple choice questions, you will be scored on the following themes from the Edfolio Skills Matrix: self-management, strategy and vision, leading a team, delivering results and continuous development. It takes around 10 minutes to complete, after which we’ll send you a bespoke analysis of your skills and areas for future development. Oh, and it’s completely free. Click here to receive your score and feel free to share it with your manager friends and colleagues.
IN FOCUS: MAKING MEETINGS MATTER.
Meetings have become the workplace bogeyman of 2023. Social media is awash with people complaining about unproductive meetings or companies bragging that they abandoned meetings altogether. E-commerce business Shopify, for example, has decided to cancel all meetings of more than two people. Their COO estimates they will delete 76,500 hours of meetings across the organisation.
Personally, I think that’s too severe. Whilst meetings can be too long, unproductive and energy-sapping, they don’t have to be. In fact, they can be motivating, focus-giving and opportunities for collective problem-solving. So if you're in an organisation with lots of unnecessary meetings, cancelling them all could be a net benefit. But I think it's better still to work on having fewer meetings which are productive, efficient and effective.
So if you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and simply want to make meetings matter in your organisation, here are my top four tips:
Keep them short. Too often, calendar meetings default to an hour. Try reducing meetings to 30 minutes to keep things snappy!
Invite fewer people. Only invite the people who are relevant to the meeting. Large meetings give people an excuse not to contribute.
Share the agenda at least 24 hours in advance, including the issues people should think about before the meeting. This will help attendees come ready with ideas.
Be brutal about cancelling recurring meetings. Ask yourself: "Is this meeting really adding value to our work?" If it isn't, bring it to an end.
If you implement just those four approaches to meetings, I am confident you will be able to reclaim time - for yourself and your workforce - whilst making sure the meetings you do keep drive increased productivity in your organisation. I’d be keen to hear your feedback - email me on lee@edfolio.co.uk.
THE GREAT TECH LAY-OFF.
It’s been a tough start to the year for people who work in tech. Google has announced 12,000 redundancies, 6 per cent of their entire workforce. This comes after Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, laid off 11,000 workers last November, and Twitter apparently let around 70 per cent of its workforce go, taking its headcount down to 2,300 (source). Whilst the majority of these lay-offs will have been in the United States, many will have been here in the UK; this means that there are likely to be a lot of highly skilled tech professionals currently looking for a new opportunity that may be a good fit for your company. In fact, they could be the people who can propel your company forward to its next stage of tech-led growth.
A REASON TO BE CHEERFUL.
Watching the news can make you feel like the country - or the world - is all doom and gloom. But there are so many reasons to be cheerful. Take this: according to Yale University's Environmental Performance Index, the United Kingdom is leading the world on the environment. Yale creates the EPI by scoring countries on their environmental performance - everything from plastics in the oceans and recycling to reducing CO2 and air quality. Their last report showed the UK came second only to Denmark for 2022. And when looking at improvements over the past decade, we were third in the world. When it comes to the future of our planet, there's more to do - of course - but there's also a lot for us to be proud of in the UK!