How to Create a Thriving Meeting Culture
There is a commonly overlooked opportunity to advance organizational culture: reinvent team and company meetings.
Unfortunately, meetings aren’t typically associated with company culture, which is a huge miss. Yet, where do leaders spend the majority of their work time? In meetings.
Company culture is regularly associated with the mission, vision, purpose and core values—the visible elements. However, the invisible elements, including norms, beliefs, and practices, are equally as important but aren’t always given attention. The way we operate in meetings is by displaying behaviors that help everyone internalize the culture.
Therefore, how we lead, show up to and structure meetings sets the tone for the organizational culture as a whole. By optimizing meetings, leaders can positively impact this core invisible aspect, which drives how the work gets done.
What’s Wrong with the Status Quo Meeting Culture:
One major issue is that leaders are in back-to-back meetings the entire day, shifting gears constantly, without any space for thinking, planning, actually getting work done, and being human.
On top of that, the majority of meetings are disorganized and unproductive, lacking a meeting agenda or purpose, without a structure and actionable take-aways. According to recent research, virtual meetings, which have surged since the pandemic, are more likely to be considered ineffective. However, virtual meetings themselves aren’t to blame, rather, they intensify what goes wrong with meetings.
Why ineffective meetings are problematic:
Feels like a waste of time, which leads to disengagement, a lack of motivation, and frustration.
Contributes to decreased productivity: two of the top productivity disruptors are inefficient meetings (#1) and too many meetings (#3), according to Microsoft’s latest Work Trends Index.
Leaves minimal time for focused or strategic work that advances the business.
Incredibly draining and depleting, contributing to the top leadership drain of leaders feeling a loss of control over their day and schedule.
Discourages building an environment where people can operate at peak performance.
What Works with a Thriving Meeting Culture:
Alternatively, when companies create a thriving meeting culture, it sets the tone for better work products, improves team cohesion, and increases energy throughout the system. Intentional and well-structured meetings can be highly effective both when entirely virtual and in-person; though a hybrid format is not as effective unless utilizing optimal technology.
Benefits of a thriving meeting culture include:
Improves productivity and wellbeing according to Slack’s latest Workforce Index.
Creates more positive emotions, which increases our ability to connect with each other, take positive action and be more innovative.
Increases trust and motivation.
Increases stamina to accomplish focused and strategic work outside of meetings.
What might be possible if everyone was consistently energized while tackling problems and business challenges as a result of the meeting culture?
Reinventing meetings starts with challenging your assumptions about meetings. In-person meetings don’t necessarily mean sitting in a conference room around a table looking at a PowerPoint presentation for one hour, back-to-back. Virtual meetings don’t necessarily mean sharing a PowerPoint read-out with everyone off video and on mute. Meeting don’t need to have one formula or process.
Instead, give yourself the freedom to reinvent meetings. Shift your mindset. Consider how to approach meetings so they are productive, energizing, engaging and motivating.
Be intentional to create team and organizational standards for structuring and conducting meetings. Develop tools and ideas that work for your team and organization. What does an effective meeting look like for the specific attendees?
How to create a thriving meeting culture
There is an enormous opportunity to cultivate organizational vitality within the meeting setting. By making desired behaviors, one of the invisible aspects of culture, more visible, everyone understands the culture and how to thrive in the organization. The four components of Vital Leadership provide a framework to foster physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual energy throughout meetings.
1. Physical Vitality: What meeting practices might support everyone’s physical wellbeing?
Cultivating physical vitality begins with recognizing we are human beings with physical bodies, not robots. We are not meant to sit all day without opportunities to move, eat or drink. Instead, incorporate movement and opportunities to refuel our bodies during or between meetings.
Strategies include:
Get creative about the meeting environment: go outside, hold meetings in different places, have standing or walking meetings, or put chairs in a circle with no table.
Encourage eating and drinking during meetings.
Give time for breaks between meetings so everyone can care for their physical bodies. For instance, change meeting durations across your entire team and/or organization from one hour to 45 minutes; from 30 minutes to 20 minutes. This also supports psychological vitality, by giving everyone space and transition time.
Have a no-meeting “lunch hour” so everyone can refuel with food and move their bodies on a daily basis.
2. Psychological Vitality: What meeting practices could be intellectually stimulating?
To encourage psychological vitality, provide a clear meeting purpose and agenda, involve attendees in intellectually stimulating discussions, and update meeting practices to include no-meeting times.
Strategies include:
Determine and communicate the meeting purpose and what you hope to accomplish. Provide a meeting agenda in advance of the meeting.
Be thoughtful about what would help everyone step into the meeting more effectively. What’s going to help us get the most out of the meeting? How could I prepare everyone?
Determine the right meeting cadence and attendees for the type of work to be accomplished.
Plan for opportunities for discussion and collaboration instead of focusing on read-outs.
Shorten meeting lengths to include space between meetings. Adopt no-meeting times or days: certain blocks of time where meetings don’t occur so everyone has dedicated time for focused and strategic work.
Effectively close meetings: know the actions and who is assigned to them. Include due dates and a “next steps” plan.
3. Emotional Vitality: How could everyone connect and cultivate positive emotions throughout the meeting?
Fostering emotional vitality involves intentionally including opportunities to connect, cultivate positive emotions and build relationships.
Strategies include:
Structure meetings to build in time for connection and trust building at the beginning and end of meetings.
Dedicate time to celebrate progress, wins and accomplishments.
Create an environment with increased positivity and two-way communication, including: look for opportunities to learn through play, add elements to stimulate creativity, bring in different tools and interactive ways to include everyone’s perspectives, or do simple things to encourage gratitude.
4. Spiritual Vitality: How could everyone connect to their best selves and/or something greater than themselves during the meeting?
To promote spiritual vitality means connecting the meeting to the bigger picture and creating an environment where everyone has the opportunity to show up at their best.
Strategies include:
Share how the meeting contributes to making progress on the bigger picture goal or initiative. Include the positive impact it will have on the organization.
Intentionally demonstrate company values during meetings. For instance, if one of the company values is collaboration: how could meetings be collaborative? If one of the values is innovation, how could meetings infuse creativity and foster idea generation?
Promote opportunities for everyone to be fully present and show up as their best selves during the meeting. What would help you show up at your best? How could you enable others to show up at their best?
Reflection: Assess your current team and wider-organization meetings: what’s working and what’s not? What one change would help you reinvent meetings to create a thriving meeting culture?
By creating the conditions for human thriving through meetings, we're giving ourselves a greater opportunity to actually live the culture we are saying we want.