How Can I Improve Zoom Meetings?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:05.000 | All right, let's move on here. Shane asks about effective and speedy Zoom meetings.

00:00:11.000 | Contradiction in terms, I don't know if that's possible.

00:00:14.000 | Let's get some more details here.

00:00:17.000 | He's in some group. They had their first meeting with 12 members.

00:00:22.000 | And while the agenda was set and the reports were sent out prior to the meeting,

00:00:26.000 | it still took nearly two hours. And so Shane is frustrated with Zoom meetings.

00:00:32.000 | Yeah, look, here's the thing about meetings like that.

00:00:35.000 | First of all, meetings with 12 people where everyone gets to just talk are a huge waste of time.

00:00:44.000 | So the idea is we have like a 12 person board and let's all just get together and kind of discuss things and figure things out.

00:00:48.000 | That's a huge waste of time.

00:00:50.000 | It's better to say, OK, there's one person going to present this thing and here's our proposal.

00:00:54.000 | And then we have like a 15 minute Q&A period and then a suggestion is going to be made.

00:00:58.000 | So more structure there really matters.

00:01:01.000 | In general, having more processes for work before the meetings make a big deal.

00:01:05.000 | So the more you're trying to accomplish ad hoc and on the fly in the meeting itself,

00:01:09.000 | the more the meeting is going to be dragged out and frustrating.

00:01:12.000 | And the more you say this is our mechanisms for making decisions, the more that's in place ahead of time,

00:01:17.000 | the more focused and effective your meetings can be.

00:01:20.000 | So if there's some process ahead of time for here are the motions being proposed

00:01:25.000 | and there will be a 10 minute discussion of the motion at one meeting.

00:01:32.000 | Then there's going to be a period of, I don't know, I'm just making this up, of like back and forth, whatever.

00:01:38.000 | People are marking up with emails or thoughts in like a shared doc, how they feel about it.

00:01:43.000 | And then a concrete proposal is brought up for a vote at the next meeting.

00:01:47.000 | There's a 10 minute Q&A portion and then the vote happens on something specific.

00:01:53.000 | What I'm talking about here is like really clear processes for how things happen.

00:01:55.000 | We're part of the process is like a here's where discussion happens.

00:01:58.000 | This type of discussion on this piece for this long.

00:02:02.000 | That gives you a lot more control as opposed to let's just figure this all out in the meeting.

00:02:06.000 | Once you have more than three people, that's not going to go very well.

00:02:11.000 | The other thing that's really useful is to make everything concrete.

00:02:13.000 | Okay, we're talking about this topic in this meeting.

00:02:15.000 | Here's a shared screen where I'm taking notes.

00:02:17.000 | This conversation is going to conclude with a clear action item assigned to someone.

00:02:21.000 | So when people know that like this is live ammo they're playing with,

00:02:24.000 | they're usually a lot more circumspect and careful about just let me just chime in and bloviate.

00:02:28.000 | When it's like, here's the thing we're trying to get to, like this person is going to do this thing.

00:02:32.000 | Makes it more serious that they think like we're just time wasting.

00:02:36.000 | Like let's all just talk about it and hopefully this dies away without me having to do more work.

00:02:39.000 | So it's like, okay, here's our goal.

00:02:41.000 | I'm going to take notes on what people are saying.

00:02:42.000 | We're going to clarify.

00:02:43.000 | Okay, let me clarify.

00:02:44.000 | Then let me propose that these will be the next steps.

00:02:45.000 | What do we think about it?

00:02:46.000 | Okay, we changed it.

00:02:47.000 | Great.

00:02:48.000 | Jack is going to do it.

00:02:49.000 | Move on.

00:02:50.000 | So be really clear.

00:02:51.000 | Everything you're discussing is wrapped up.

00:02:53.000 | It's written down, wrapped up, summarized, and assigned.

00:02:57.000 | All right.

00:02:58.000 | Zoom effective and speedy Zoom meetings.

00:03:00.000 | Not a lot of those.

00:03:01.000 | [Music]

How Can I Improve Zoom Meetings?

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