Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 3/17/25

In this week’s Monday Morning Update,  Mr. H launched a poll that asks about reader strategies to reduce the time spent in meetings that are less than productive.

After a couple of decades in healthcare IT, with many of those spent working on large and lengthy projects, I feel like I’ve attended more than my share of unproductive meetings. I can’t wait to see the poll results, but here are my recommendations for productive meetings (most of which are directly related to having high performing teams, so I’ll include those too).

• Consider making meetings shorter than standard blocks. I’m a huge fan of having 50-minute meetings rather than hour-long ones, or 25-minute meetings rather than half-hour ones. This approach provides attendees time between meetings to prepare and arrive promptly for the next.
• Start meetings on time with no apologies. One of my favorite hobbies is to calculate the cost per minute when people start “just a few minutes late to allow others to arrive.” I’m regularly in meetings with high-level executives and multiple external consultants where the burn rate is in excess of $3K per hour. Every minute counts in those situations.
• Be mindful of small talk and whether it’s good for your team dynamics. If team members are stressed about other projects or a previous meeting, odds are they may not want to hear about what everyone did over the weekend.
• Have an agenda before the meeting is scheduled. No agenda, no meeting.
• Distribute any key materials that will be discussed with the meeting invitation and agenda. There’s nothing worse than trying to read and understand things that are brand new to you while someone is also talking about them and presenting slides that may or may not summarize the concepts.
• Use time-boxed agendas to keep people on track.
• Assign specific meeting roles. including timekeeper and scribe. The latter can be outsourced to AI tools, although a human scribe should still proofread it and make any necessary corrections.
• For standing meetings with a designated set of regular attendees, consider creating a Team Operating Agreement that defines how the team operates and how it handles team members that either don’t participate or that tend do monopolize the meeting. This can enable the team to self-police and discuss when people aren’t interacting with the group at the expected level. Many of us hated group projects when we were in school, and having a Team Operating Agreement is often a good antidote to bad behavior.
• As you’re creating your Team Operating Agreement, be mindful of how you want to manage video calls and people who are not on camera. I’ve been in plenty of meetings where people have been called out for not being on camera and not in a nice way. As a consultant who has worked in dozens of organizations over the years, this can be a minefield. Maybe someone wants to turn their camera off to blow their nose, eat their lunch, or just decompress for a few minutes because they’ve been on for four hours straight. These should all be OK. If you’re concerned about someone being excessively off camera, address the issue privately.
• If you’re working across multiple time zones, there’s a good chance that you’ll be scheduling during someone’s typical lunch time. Consider identifying these as camera-off meetings to allow people to eat lunch without having to apologize about it. Back in the days when I was in an office full time at a health system ,we routinely had brown bag lunch meetings and everyone ate in front of each other, so it still feels a little weird to me that people have to apologize for taking care of a basic physical need.
• For meetings that are hybrid with some attendees in person and some remote, make sure someone knows how to operate the cameras and screens effectively so that everyone feels like they have the same level of participation and engagement. The same thing goes for telephones and audio hookups.
• For meetings where people are expected to deliver status reports, require them to submit those reports in advance and distribute them to the group along with the agenda (you might see a theme here). Then you can do a speed round of “any questions” and reduce the likelihood of conducting a meeting that should have been an email.
• If decision makers or required participants are not in the room, reschedule. Don’t waste everyone’s time going through an agenda if it’s all going to have to be repeated in a meeting after the meeting.
• Learn how to use your calendar’s scheduling assistant. If you need to send an invite outside someone’s typical work hours or when they have a conflict, ask them if they can shift their workday before scheduling the meeting. Even if you can’t accommodate an individual, the fact that you at least asked / discussed the issue goes a long way towards building a good working relationship as opposed to just sending people appointments at 4am in their time zone without any recognition of the fact that it might be inconvenient.
• If you’re going to do a presentation during a meeting, make sure you know how to share your screen and how to either enter presenter mode or how to share your slides through your meeting app. There’s nothing more distracting than watching a side deck being delivered by clicking through the editable presentation.
• Allow for a recap at the end of the meeting where action items and their owners are reviewed. This helps prevent surprises.
• Make corrected minutes / notes available within one business day, while people still remember at least some of the meetings they attended.
• Consider having “no meeting” blocks where colleagues have dedicated time to actually get their work done and honor these blocks like they are sacred. I’ve seen plenty of organizations put these events on their calendars and then schedule right over them, so it does take a certain amount of cultural commitment to actually make it happen.

There you have it, folks. It’s like a free hour of management consulting from someone who has definitely been there and done that. In the meantime, visit the poll and let us know how you tackle the issue of unproductive meetings. If you have a great story to share, leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.