9. What is the right length for a meeting?
Translated from the French original.
Photo by Anne McCarthy – Pexels
“What is the right length for a meeting?” is a question I am regularly asked.
The answer is simple:
“As long as it takes to cover the items on the agenda, while making sure every participant leaves feeling they have been useful.”
Some will think I’m pulling their leg with this answer, treating them to a rerun of the Fernand Raynaud sketch.
But it is probably the right one. The question needs to be dealt with at the meeting-design stage:
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What is the outcome I want to have reached by the end of this meeting?
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Who do I need in order to reach it?
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How much time will be needed for every person in the room to be able to contribute?
The last question is obvious, yet often neglected.
Indeed, it is often not the topic that determines the length of a meeting, but rather the number of people in the room. Especially if you have in mind to make those people’s presence useful by giving them time to share their point of view.
Paul AXTELL, an American expert and author of the book “Meetings matter”, recommends allowing half an hour per topic that needs a discussion.
That recommendation is of course debatable and dogmatic.
Keeping it in mind, however, can make you cautious about the number of topics you put on an agenda, and the number of people you invite to cover it.
In any case, whichever approach you choose, you need to allow for several things
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Time to launch the meeting, latecomers included.
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A precise duration for each topic.
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A time keeper to raise the alarm when things slip.
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Not too much optimism, which so often makes you think you’ll claw back in the second half of the meeting the time lost in the first.
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A final evaluation, to make sure everyone is aware of the overruns and that corrective actions will be put in place.
To the question “What is the right length for a meeting”, I invite you to keep this answer in mind:
Longer than planned…
Ecole Internationale de Réuniologie
#reuniologie #meeting #louisvareille #ecoleinternationaledereuniologie #reunionite #reuniologue #reunion
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