As the world’s first office space marketplace allowing clients to lease offices directly from providers using its streamlined process, ShareSpace understands the value of efficient time management. Ensuring adequate time is allocated to the matters at hand with due focus and alignment is simply essential.
Rather than trying to keep meetings short just for the sake of it, at ShareSpace, the overarching aim is for meetings to be efficient. Such an approach facilitates the running of powerful and meaningful meetings, all the while their 15-minute duration comes as a natural result.
How does this happen? At ShareSpace, we have adopted a simple, tested, and proven three-step process that guarantees every meeting is short, precise, actionable & valuable.
#1 Define a clear purpose
“To make sure meetings are productive, I always encourage organizers to define a clear purpose across three simple dimensions,” says Robert Chmielewski, CEO, and Co-founder of ShareSpace.
- Sharing information – driven by the motivation of growing awareness of a certain topic
- Brainstorming – collecting brainpower to advance a problem
- Taking action – aligning stakeholders to a decision or delivering an action-plan
Even the seemingly simple step of setting the purpose of a meeting in the following way allows the organizer to determine whether a meeting is even necessary in the first place. If perhaps, a focused message to the decision-makers will be sufficient instead, the hypothetical meeting time is already brought down to zero.
#2 Set an agenda in bullet point format
Next, if the organizer decides a meeting is in order, they are encouraged to set an agenda in bullet point format.
“We ask them to form questions around the topics they would like to discuss,” explains Robert Chmielewski. “Questions, we find, are more precise than statements.”
As an example, such questions can look like the following:
–How are we changing our approach to our partners?
-What will be the new mode of partner compensation?
Tip: Sharing the agenda beforehand with meeting participants allows everyone to get acquainted with the topic and come prepared. It’s an effective way to avoid that dreadful first 15 minutes at the start of a meeting when everyone is trying to find their footing on what is about to be discussed.
#3 Take charge of moderating the meeting
In their essence, “Meetings are all about harnessing the power of information sharing,” says Robert Chmielewski, adding that “To avoid unnecessary digressions, we make sure that organizers always take charge of moderating, ensuring that they keep to the proposed agenda, do not stray off-topic, and are mindful of the time committed by all the participants.”
Conclusion
Meetings are best-done face-to-face, whether virtually or, preferably, in person. This facilitates the optimal setting for conveying emotions, ideas, and openness. Meetings that don’t feel “too long” are just the by-product of such an approach.
Communicating mostly in the written form usually risks too much getting lost in translation.
If a certain question is so broad that it can’t be summarized in a short e-mail, it serves as further proof for the organizer that a meeting is indeed in order.
“While we follow the three-step process, we never run the risks of running meetings that could’ve been an e-mail but conversely never cause miscommunication by sending e-mails that should’ve been a meeting,” advises Robert Chmielewski.
Interested in learning more tips to help you successfully and productively run your office? Read about 3 workspace models that will bring your team back to the office or find out how coworking changes the concept of the workplace.
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