Stand Up for Meetings
The best way to facilitate meetings is to have them standing up. Learn more about this technique here.Â
Meetings! I just love meetings! I love them so much that I want them to be over as quickly as possible, so I can get the heck out of this meeting and on to something more useful. Like the next meeting.
Only one secret skill is needed to make that happen: Get people to focus, pay attention, and use time efficiently. When meetings are accompanied by that tasteful little tray on the side table containing delicious food and drinks, no one ever wants to leave. But there are ways!
One of the simplest is to have meetings standing up, with no refreshments available. Yes, standing up. When people are standing, their laps disappear! Laptops become unusable. When they don’t have a table conveniently at waist level, they can’t surf the web on their smartphone or engage in behind-the-scenes text gossip. People have no choice except to make eye contact and pay attention.
Standing up is also less comfortable than sitting at a desk; people have incentive to speed the meeting along. And as for preparation, you’ll quickly discover that you can’t really web surf or thumb through papers on the fly while standing. So your esteemed colleagues will quickly learn to prepare in advance so they don’t have to publicly fumble with their papers while attempting to look cool. No one looks cool fumbling with paper. Not even Justin Bieber.
Meetings are bad enough as it is. Make them worse by holding them standing up with no refreshments, and you’ll quickly reach new heights of efficiency, if only out of self-preservation.
Two businesswomen having an informal meeting from Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.Â
