How can I make meetings more productive?
“I make kitchens as if they were for myself.” The accompanying, juicy West Flemish accent is difficult to capture on paper. But if you read the sentence again, it will sound as if Donald himself is whispering it in your ear. What a tagline. If Mr. Muyle hadn’t already come up with this ingenious slogan, we would have liked to use it ourselves.
“We offer meeting rooms as if they were our own.” It doesn’t sound too bad. The only difference is that sausage with applesauce prepared in a cold IKEA kitchen tastes the same as sausage with applesauce made in Donald’s Dovy kitchen. However, the productivity of a meeting is closely related to the place and atmosphere in which the meeting takes place.
Why meetings matter
Let’s start at the beginning. Can you do the math? The average employee attends 187 hours of meetings annually. That’s the equivalent of 23 working days or about 1/10th of a full-time equivalent (FTE). For a company with 100 employees, this means that 10 employees would be sitting in meetings full-time. Furthermore, several studies have shown that an average of 56% of those meetings are experienced as “unproductive.” For a company with 100 employees, that amounts to a waste of 5 FTEs per year.
Meetings matter, but too many meetings are not only detrimental to employees’ well-being, but also result in hidden financial waste. There has to be a better way, right?
How can we reduce meeting waste?
Meetings take time. But an effective meeting should generate more productivity than the opportunity cost it incurs. Yet, we still spend too much time in meetings that produce too little productivity gain. How do we tackle this problem?
- Invest less time in meetings. Want to know how to do that? Get inspired by these 7 meeting hygiene tips.
- Increase the productivity of your meeting. Discover our 8 tips to boost your meeting.
A small caveat: about 1/6th of all our meetings are meetings in which we brainstorm, make strategic decisions, or make tough calls. These kinds of meetings simply take time and do not tolerate a “fixed meeting structure.” So how can we increase the productivity of these meetings?
Creativity as a trigger for productivity
The productivity of these kinds of meetings heavily depends on how comfortable, free, and relaxed the participants feel. In these meetings, productivity is the result of creativity, which can truly flourish in a warm atmosphere and a feeling of informal freedom. It’s not surprising that research shows that creativity is particularly related to the environment in which someone finds themselves. Comfort, ample space, a cozy decor, and atmospheric lighting are important factors.
Therefore, give your teams every opportunity to hold crucial meetings in “a meeting room as if it were their own.”
Curious about how a homey meeting space can take your meeting to the next level? Discover all the meeting locations on Meeting-out and get inspired.
