5 Alternatives to Meetings

Meetings can cost time and money, according to a research from Epson. This is especially true for unproductive meetings in which people spend hours without achieving anything. It’s no wonder why a lot of folks dread meetings.

Of course, productive meetings are a different story. They make attendees feel that something important has been accomplished, and they make the next several meetings something to look forward to. Unfortunately, unproductive meetings seem to be the norm for many people, while productive meetings seem rarer than a unicorn with a rainbow horn.

A big reason why many meetings are unproductive is that they are held for the wrong reasons. Meetings are for strategic decision-making — not for updating, relaying information, and especially not for chit-chatting.

Meetings are unavoidable, but they are not applicable for many scenarios. There are alternatives to meetings depending on the situation, such as:

Requesting for project status updates

When you want to get project status updates, ask for individual reports from members of your team instead of holding a meeting. It’s likely that they don’t need to know what everyone else is working on, so there’s no reason to gather them in one place and make them listen to what each one has to say. Imagine if you have a team of 20 people, and all of them are given five minutes to talk. This means that after someone is done speaking, they’re expected to sit for 95 minutes doing nothing but listening to something that doesn’t necessarily concern them. That’s quite a long time that could be used for something much more productive, like actually working on a project.

Making announcements

Like project status updates, announcements (especially the FYI kind) don’t have to be disseminated in a meeting. Email blasts often work for this purpose. If you think your email will be overlooked, you can send follow-up messages and ask for acknowledgement to make sure that everyone gets the information. If there are any request for clarification, you can answer them via email, too. Schedule meetings only when it’s absolutely necessary, like when someone asks complicated questions that are better answered in person.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a good reason for holding meetings, but only after everyone has the chance to think of something significant to contribute. Otherwise, you and your team will waste time convening first then trying to come up with something from scratch. For the initial brainstorming session, it’s better to work with one another using an enterprise meeting solution like Convene which allows collaboration on documents. You can assign a document as your team’s repository of ideas, and then ask everyone to add to it if they think of something helpful. Members of your team can access this document wherever they are and whenever they can as long as they have a mobile device and Internet connection. After this initial round of virtual collaboration, you can schedule a meeting to further expand on the team’s current collection of ideas.

Team building

If you want the members of your team to develop strong professional relationships, take them out of the workplace and put them in a more social situation where they can get to know one another better. So, instead of holding a meeting, schedule a group lunch or better yet, a weekend team building trip in which everyone gets the chance to work with one another beyond their usual projects. Team building exercises usually include activities that encourage the development of interpersonal skills, resulting in better team performance. Lessons learned from these exercises can be applied to the workplace.

Connecting with your team members

A casual conversation can reveal more than a formal one-on-one meeting. If you want to establish a relationship with your team as their manager, reach out to them as a leader would, and not as a boss. Talk to them, ask them what they find challenging about their work, get to know them as individuals, etc. They are likely to open up to you if they think they can easily approach you. Save the meetings for necessary matters such as performance reviews, promotions, etc.

What other alternatives to meetings can you think of? We’d love to hear from you!!