We have all been there, hostage to terrible and endless meetings. It is the intolerable waste of our time; the energy-draining no-agenda meeting with its long-winded pontificators, nonparticipating zombies, sidebar babblers, smartphone-addicted tweeters, and obsessive email checkers. Add all that up and you get a meeting that doesn’t produce much progress.
But wait, there is hope! (Cue the trumpets!).
Have you tried holding a meeting standing up?
Although not technically new, the stand-up meeting is taking hold with forward-thinking companies trying to make the best use of their time and energy.
Is that how it works:
Really simple, everyone must meet while standing. There’s no table to rest your laptop on or hide your iPhone while you check messages. There is a sense of urgency to get started. Standing up minimizes the time lost getting settled, the non-business chatter, and the rest that a conference table provides.
These are fast-paced meetings that get to the heart of the matter and get people back to your posts quickly.
It’s like a sit-down meeting is the new sloth.
I have a hotel client who brings key department heads together every morning for their stand-up, and quickly updates their colleagues on three things: what they’ve done since yesterday’s meeting; what is your role in serving hotel guests, conferences and events today; and what obstacles stand in the way of getting your job done.
Rachel Emma Silverman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said, “Holding stand-up meetings isn’t new. Some military leaders did it during World War I, according to Allen Bluedorn, a business professor at the University of Missouri. Several companies have adopted standing meetings over the years. Mr. Bluedorn did a study in 1998 that found standing meetings were about a third shorter than seated meetings and the quality of decision-making was about the same.”
More ideas to speed things up.
Some Microsoft departments in cold Washington state have been known to hold their meetings standing on an unheated stairwell to keep meetings short.
Holding meetings before lunch can speed things up. Try to schedule your stand up right at noon. The anticipation of lunch can be a great motivator to keep things fresh and wonderfully short.
The front-loading of some “say consequences” can also be helpful, if not amusing. If employees are late for the meeting, they may have to entertain the group by singing a song like “I’m a Little Teapot,” doing push-ups, or paying a small fine.
If someone is rambling for too long, an employee can hold up a rubber rat, signaling it’s time to “get us out of the rat hole” and move on, all in good fun without the stigma of a personal attack.
Why not try the stand up meeting? See if it doesn’t save valuable time, keep everyone highly focused, and even improve morale in the process.