Flipped Meetings
Unproductive meetings cost economies millions of pounds and force adults to doodle wasting time. This lack of attention is a lost opportunity. Statistically, an average American can lose 10% of their lives in meetings which is a scary statistic to reflect on.
Every week there is meeting monotony. This is because when you send an agenda to a meeting it’s your meeting, not our meeting. A text-based agenda can be interpreted differently by different meeting attendees. Emotionally you could put some people on a positive footing whilst others might be apprehensive.
With this in mind, it’s worth thinking about redesigning your meetings. Meetings should be a magical experience. It should be something that people look forward to. It’s about meeting creatively, collaborating and problem-solving.
In recent years the flipped classroom has become popularised in education. Instead of the teachers standing at the front of the class each lesson and dictating to students this is flipped. The teacher sends out video lessons which are watch before class. During classroom time more coaching and interactive activity is undertaken. Just as flipped learning works within the education sector there is no reason why we can’t flip our meetings to bolster productivity.
Instead of filing your management report as a slide deck or PDF, you can produce a screencast. This can be sent prior to the management meeting. Doing this allows people to engage with content when they are in the mood. By allowing people to interact on their terms you gain more attention. You also give people longer to think about the particular issues that you’ve raised.
By redesigning your meetings you can make it more about working together. You can harness everyone’s collective brainpower. Flipping the meeting allows people to listen to your content and do further research so that the meeting is better prepared. If you were to do this in an actual meeting it would be perceived as rude but asynchronous communication makes it socially acceptable. One final benefit is by flipping the meeting you get to focus on the big issues.
This is where flipping your meeting can help harness the collective intelligence of your team. By sending a video or voice note before your meeting everyone can get up to speed with the management report and perhaps what the priorities might be. This means when people arrive at the actual meeting they are emotionally on the same page.
Don’t be put off by the technical skills needed to flip your meetings. Non-technical people can get started quickly. You can enable the Watch and Learn Screen Recorder for the Google Chrome Browser. You can then quickly record your screen with your Office365, Google Docs or other management reports. Finally, these screencasts can be easily shared into management groups for consumption. Once people have played your screencasts you can see who has played them and any comments.
By flipping your meeting death by PowerPoint can be avoided. You can now start your meeting with this question: What would you all like to talk about? The meeting becomes a discussion, allowing everyone to contribute.