Transform your Meeting Culture Together

The trouble with meetings

Let's face it: meetings are often the bane of our working lives. Picture this: it's Monday morning, and instead of diving into your to-do list, you're trapped in a stuffy conference room, listening to a monotonous, hour-long presentation about... something (you zoned out 10 minutes in). Or the brainstorming session that’s less “storm” and more “light drizzle.” Don't even get us started on the 'we-could-have-discussed-this-over-an-email' meetings. In essence, traditional meetings can feel like a black hole that swallows up your most productive hours, leaving you with the dreaded 'meeting hangover'.

You are definitely not the only one struggling with this. Typically, people suggest setting clear goals for the meeting and ending with some action takeaways. Most of us have heard about the benefits of check-ins and time-boxing, and we know it's important to encourage active participation from attendees. Some recommendations even suggest that we should question whether we need to have a meeting at all.

Create your meeting rules, approaches, and culture together

Our belief is this: There's no one-size-fits-all solution. You have to tailor any so-called "best practice" to fit your team like a glove. And you have to engage your team from day one. The most brilliant idea will fall flat if your team doesn't buy in or get on board. Get every team member involved - ask for their thoughts and energy. Make sure they know it's their show, let them run with it.

Nyord offers a software solution that empowers teams to address the question of "how can we work better together" - including your meetings.  It revolves around the idea of inclusivity, making it easy to include everyone affected by the topic at hand. By using this approach, Nyord ensures that everyone's voice is heard, making the process more efficient and productive. Here is how it works.

Step 1: Understand the needs of the people involved 

This step is about gathering observations, insights and experiences from everyone involved in the meeting culture discussion. The conversation can be structured by creating specific categories, such as "What's already working?" and "What are the biggest issues with our meeting culture?” Participants contribute anonymously, providing feedback and rating each other's contributions on a scale of 1 to 5. All insights are ranked in real-time according to their relevance to the group, providing valuable insight into the group's priorities.

Examples of insights that might come up: A team might highlight the great use of collaborative tools as a positive, while identifying long, unfocused meetings as a problem.

Benefits of Nyord:

• Promote inclusion. Asynchronous and anonymous posting allows you to include the introverts as well as the talkers, the remote workers as well as the onsite folks, and the intern as well as the most senior members.
• Overcome groupthink: A participant's input is locked until they contribute their insight. This helps you avoid the trap of open brainstorming, where the first few comments set the tone for everything to come, and you'll get surprisingly fresh insights into what's really going on.
• Get results, fast: Participants rate each other's inputs without knowing the average rating, and can only see the average rating after the fact, so you quickly learn which inputs the group finds most relevant.

Step 2: Engage people in idea generation

Now it's time to brainstorm solutions based on the insights you've collected. What actions can we take? What policies can we agree on? Suggestions can range from small culture hacks to detailed initiatives. Participants post their proposals, which are then open for comment and discussion by the team. As in step 1, ideas are rated anonymously, and the highest-rated ideas rise to the top of the list, so you can quickly identify the most promising solutions.

Example of a suggestion: To address the problem of meetings ending without clear action steps, a proposed solution might be "Assign a member to summarize action items at the end of each meeting.”

Benefits of Nyord:

• Avoid social loafing. To get people thinking, each participant must contribute at least one idea to trigger reading of other contributions.
• Speed up decision making. Say goodbye to endless discussions and lame compromises. Select the top-rated ideas to move to the testing phase.
• Higher commitment to implementation. Exposing people to possible solutions and hearing the pros and cons at this stage helps them make up their own minds and makes implementation much easier later on.

Step 3: Experiment and learn

With a list of top-rated ideas, a team leader can set up experiments to implement and test the proposed solutions. Each experiment has a defined timeline, and at the end, team members are asked to rate the success of the experiment. This authentic feedback provides valuable insight into which practices or agreements worked well, which didn't, and why. 

Armed with this understanding, the team can continually improve its meeting practices and create an environment where collaboration thrives.

Example for an experiment: One experiment might be to agree that at each meeting, a different member, going around in alphabetical order, is responsible for summarizing action items and sending them to each participant, and after six weeks, ask people if this has improved things.

Benefits of Nyord:

• Low communication overhead. By setting up experiments in a digital space that is accessible to all participants, people can post and discuss their experiences as the experiment progresses.
• Get measurable results. At the end of the test phase, each participant is automatically asked to rate the outcome of the experiment.
• Easy documentation. Experiments are documented and shared with other teams, so you can learn from each other and inspire other teams to try something that worked well for your team.

Better ways of working - with Nyord

Nyord provides a simple but effective framework for your team to co-create ways of working that are inclusive, transparent and without the need for a skilled facilitator. And not only that. We believe that working together on challenges in an ongoing and participatory way leads to happier employees, improves overall collaboration and fosters a greater sense of belonging within the team, contributing to an overall positive work environment.

Are you ready to transform your meeting culture?

Sign up and try Nyord today.