KeyQuest’s TeamUP Team Analyses reveal that consultation and decision-making are the biggest sources of dissatisfaction among the 10 key team development aspects. Inefficient meetings, in particular, cause significant frustration among respondents. Yet, meetings remain a vital source of information that isn’t documented elsewhere, making them crucial for communication and decision-making within a company. So let’s break free from the ritual of long and unproductive meetings and ensure that our meetings add value to our workday!
To help you with this, we have outlined 5 tips for more efficient meetings and improved decision-making:
1. Reward preparation and effective meeting behavior
Make agreements with each other and hold one another accountable for these agreements. For example, we all know that a well-prepared meeting comes with an agenda. What do you do if this is missing? And what do you do if your colleague has not read the preparation material? We recommend having the conversation only with people who are well-prepared. This may sound harsh, but it encourages positive behavior patterns and discourages poor preparation.
The same goes for time spent in a meeting. Ensure that issues with little impact reach a decision within a few minutes, while issues with significant impact receive sufficient time. In short: agree on what is truly important and “how” you want to meet with each other, and act accordingly. Reward adherence to agreements and address each other when this does not happen.
2. Create a safe climate
Psychological safety within a team is the shared belief that it is okay to take risks, express ideas and concerns, ask questions, and admit mistakes – all without fear of negative consequences, according to Harvard Business Review. It is a license for openness. The feeling of psychological safety leads to greater engagement, increased motivation, improved decision-making, more creative ideas, and more diverse perspectives.
Having psychological safety and therefore a safe climate for meetings leads to better consultations and benefits decision-making. So make sure you create a safe environment in your team! Make clear that everyone's voice matters, admit that you too make mistakes, actively ask for input, and replace blame with curiosity (ask exploratory questions!) and you will see that the climate in your team improves.
Additionally, invest in getting to know each other better as individuals. Share with one another what is important to you and why. And indicate where you feel vulnerable. When vulnerability is allowed and accepted, safety and trust in the team grow. And that is a prerequisite for effective discussions and decision-making.
3. Stop convincing and ask humble exploratory questions
Many meetings feel like an arm-wrestling match — who can persuade the other best? The problem is that discussions often end in either a compromise or a situation with a winner and a loser, leading to frustration and inefficiency. It’s important to share your perspective, but avoid repeating yourself just to prove you're right. Instead, shift from debate to dialogue at the right moment.
Psychologist and theorist Edgar Schein advises asking questions during meetings. Show curiosity and interest! Instead of asking obvious questions, it helps to bring the bigger picture into focus by asking goal-oriented questions. So, don't ask for a detail that you could read in documents, but instead ask, for example, “Why do we see in studies that employee happiness in team A is structurally lower than in team B?”. Moreover, do not ask questions from your own perspective; instead, be open to gaining new insights. You can arrive at entirely new understandings together by asking exploratory questions. Asking the right questions elevates meetings to a higher level and makes the decision-making process more convincing. In short, delve into the art of questioning instead of dictating.
4. Assess your decision-making: is the decision really a decision?
Is the decision made truly a decision? Or do you notice that everyone keeps going round in circles and the topic keeps resurfacing in every meeting? If so, investigate what the issue is.
Ask yourself questions like:
- Is the decision too vague, leaving concrete actions and consequences unclear?
- Why was the decision made?
- Is everyone truly behind the decision?
- What should the decision lead to?
- What are the effects of the decisions?
- How important and impactful are the decisions?
Try to gauge whether the problems related to decision-making can be resolved by giving everyone more time to think and exploring in depth. But also be cautious of wasting time: how important is a point, and is it worth investing more time in it? Of course, the opposite can also be true; sometimes chairs want to move too quickly, causing the right conversation not to take place. If points keep reappearing on the agenda, it is a sign that there is actually no good meeting decision-making in place or that there is resistance, and people say "yes" but do "no."
5. Evaluate and express what you want to improve
It appears that people are not very good at discussing how they experience meetings. People complain among themselves that meetings take too long, are not efficient, lack decision-making, or have insufficient quality content, but do not express this to the team and the chair(s). Our advice is to do just that. Make experiences discussable, then improvement can occur. At the end of the meeting, ask whether the style was workable for everyone and if there are points for improvement. Additionally, schedule a structural meeting once a quarter to evaluate.
Questions that could be asked here include:
- Are the right things on the agenda?
- Do we have the right people in the meeting?
- What do we need from each other to be able to be vulnerable?
- Are we making the right decisions?
- How effectively are we conversing during our meetings?
- Are we hitting the goal of decision-making?
- Is there good follow-up on our decisions?
Hopefully, these tips will help your team on the path to efficient meetings and decision-making. Does your team need external help? KeyQuest offers all the support you need to build a good team. If you want to know more, feel free to contact us.
References
Gallo, A. (2023, February 15). What Is Psychological Safety? Harvard Business Review.
https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety
Garcia, A. C. B., Kunz, J., & Fischer, M. R. (2005). Voting on the agenda: the key to social efficient meetings. International Journal of Project Management.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2004.05.003
K. (2019, November 12). Working or wasting time?
https://www.kornferry.com/about-us//press/working-or-wasting-time
So you can make all those long meetings meaningful. (2001, February 3). FD.nl.
https://fd.nl/opinie/1466601/zo-maak-je-al-die-lange-vergaderingen-wel-zinvol
