We’ve all been there before; it’s late in the afternoon, you’ve been on back-to-back video calls since very early in the morning, you haven’t had a proper break and you have a load of work to get through by tomorrow. Except tomorrow is looking just like today. With many of us working in a global environment, and our days bleeding beyond the traditional working hours as we connect with colleagues or clients from around the world, these days of endless meetings are becoming more the rule than the exception.

With burnout in the legal profession on the rise, it does make you wonder whether we can do more to control how we spend our time, and that of our teams’, particularly when it comes to the way we organize and host meetings.

Here are a few quick tips to consider to make sure your meeting time is effective and efficient.

Establish terms of engagement

However you plan to manage your meetings going forward, consider agreeing on the approach and documenting these as team expectations. This might mean you expect team members to be fully present without distractions, or to have completed the pre-reads in advance. While you would hope this doesn’t have to become a performance issue for anyone, at least those expectations have been clearly communicated.

Is a meeting really necessary?

No doubt that we’ve all been in a meeting before that was solely informational and could have easily been an email. While creating an opportunity to facilitate a discussion and to connect with others is important, make sure that the topic actually warrants the time. If you want to elicit some conversation around the topic, email may not be the right forum as you’ll quickly fill inboxes. Perhaps consider starting an instant messaging chat as an alternative which others can respond to with a quick thumbs-up to confirm agreement if that is all that’s needed.

Establish your meeting objective(s)

Whether it is a weekly round-up or a discussion about a specific project, clarity around the objective of the discussion keeps everyone focused and less likely to drift onto other, perhaps adjacent but not directly relevant, topics. If the discussion wanders, simply acknowledge that the issue may be important, but one that will require a separate time as we are here today to discuss ‘X’. Remember to state your meeting objective in the calendar appointment with your agenda, and frame it again at the outset of your discussion. As you close the meeting, be clear on whether you’ve achieved the purpose of the discussion and what next steps may be required and by whom.

The weekly round-up

The weekly round-up or roundtable sharing of information is another great example of a meeting that serves a purpose but may not always be well-executed. While the intent is often to create transparency around workloads, which can be particularly useful for the law department managers and leaders, it may sometimes feel like a painful exercise for those on the call who have very little overlap with their colleagues. At the same time, these occasions also present an excellent opportunity to connect team members together and lead to greater sharing of information. Instead of asking team members to share a laundry list of what is on their plate which might hamper engagement, consider a different approach, such as the one below.

All attendees will be asked to provide a brief update (2-3 mins max) in any one of these three broad categories:

• Information recently learned that would be helpful to others
• A recent success/failure and the lessons learned
• Areas where support is needed

If more transparency into workloads is needed, consider whether you need a more formal system such as a matter management tool to support you.

Consider who really needs to be in the discussion

While taking an inclusive approach to your meeting roster is important to including the various perspectives you will want to weigh in on the discussion, taking a town-hall approach doesn’t always produce decisions or results. Reflect on the purpose of the discussion and your objective and reverse-engineer the perspectives you’ll need to obtain to achieve the desired result. Those invited could also be given an opportunity to consider whether a designate should be attending in their place. This provides great growth opportunities for others, although those individuals would need to feel empowered to make decisions and share their perspectives.

Send pre-reads

You can drastically reduce the time needed for a discussion by circulating the materials/slides in advance that you plan to cover in your discussion. The meeting time is then reserved for feedback or discussion of the topic. While finding the time to review the pre-reads can arguably be considered to be adding to the total commitment of time required, it can be done whenever convenient for the attendee. Be mindful that you’ll want to send the slides or materials at least 24 hours in advance to give everyone the time and space to review.

Consider how people will connect

With many of us working in a hybrid environment, we may be attending meetings where some participants are dialing in remotely but others may be connecting together live in a boardroom. The greatest challenge in this situation is to ensure those working remotely can hear and see those speaking around the boardroom table and feel included in the conversation. The situation can be exacerbated if the meeting allows for breaks and discussion in which those dialing in will not be able to participate. While some of these dynamics are unavoidable, consider asking everyone in the boardroom to bring their laptop and dial into the call (muted), with one central line for audio, so everyone can be clearly seen and heard on the video screens of those joining remotely.

Keep to meeting time and limit distractions

If you are chairing a meeting, it’s your role to make sure the discussion moves swiftly, that there is appropriate conversational turn-taking and listening, objectives are achieved and that you end the meeting on time. If the topic requires further conversation or reflection, you can simply schedule another session. If you run over time, you will likely have people disconnect before the conversation is closed leading to loose ends. Instead, wrap up the discussion 5 minutes before the end of the call and briefly determine as a group whether the objective was achieved and, if not, agree on next steps, including a potential follow-up discussion.

It’s also fair to ask attendees to commit to limiting distractions while in the conversation. While this may be impossible in some situations, consider asking team members to change their availability status to “Do Not Disturb” and perhaps temporarily silence email notifications during the discussion.