Economy of little things @ work - 45 minutes meetings

"Another meeting? I am sorry for being late, my previous meeting went over; If only I get the chance to talk; Let's take it offline"...... does any of this sound familiar? We all love to hate meetings. But, do we? After running hundreds and thousands of meetings, I believe we do not hate meetings; we hate BAD meetings.

Every meeting has a cost associated with it and simplest way to calculate is number of participant(s) x prorated hourly rate(without going into hourly rate of each participant). So, it's not a surprise that we have numerous studies and resources available on running effective meetings.

What is the most common duration of a meeting? One hour - it is default duration in most of the common planning tools. And even if there is a half an hour meeting, ask yourself whether the goal of the meeting was accomplished in that half an hour? How many times it went way beyond the half an hour and took up the hour?

One of the interesting concepts I came across in recent past was conducting 45 minute meetings instead of traditional 1 hour meetings. Classic studies show that groups adjust both their rate of work and their style of interaction in response to deadlines and time constraints. For example, one study showed that “groups solving problems communicated at a faster rate and used more autocratic decision-making processes under high time pressure than they did when time pressure was low.” That sounds very promising to move towards 45 minutes meetingsfrom traditional 1 hour meetings.

So, I started running 45 minutes instead of 1 hour meetings quite some time. And to my surprise, I have found the benefits are amazing when combined with the below best practices or DPAM rules:

Duration- Set up the 45 minutes meeting at the beginning of the hour. Most of the scheduling calendar(s) does not support 45 minute meeting by default, but one can overwrite most of the scheduling calendars for 45 min duration.

Participants- Invite only the participants who will contribute towards the outcome of the meeting. You can keep other folks (who needs to be informed) in loop through the minutes of the meeting. I would also suggest being cognizant on participants blindly forwarding meeting invites to folks they think should be there.

Agenda- Be very specific on the agenda items and expected output from the meeting. Share the agenda at least a day or more in advance; time box each agenda item within the 45 minutes meeting and reserve last 5 mins to recap the action items. If participants are expected to come prepared in the meeting, make sure those artifacts are shared prior to the meeting and enough time is given to participants for review.Participants should clearly know exactly what is expected of them prior to the meeting.

Minutes- No productive meeting ends without clearly defined action items, who owns it and when it will be delivered. Meeting minutes should be distributed on the same day. I understand it can be challenging for organizers who runs tons of meetings every day, hence it's good to have a designated scribe during the meeting to capture the minutes and share with the organizer immediately after the meeting.

Here are some of the key benefits I have realized and can be expected through running 45 minutes meetings:

• Organizations save 15 minutes and associated cost (number of participant(s) x prorated hourly rate) for each meeting
• Participants get 15 minutes to gather their thoughts and go to their next meeting or continue to focus on their priority list. No more "I am sorry for being late, my previous meeting went over"
• Promotes a culture of getting more done in less than what used to take through better engagement from both organizer and participants of the meeting

So, are you running 45 minutes meetings or want to try out running 45 minute meetings? I would love to hear your experience(s).