Think about the difference in your speed, when you run alone versus running with others, or even more, running in a race. Or how you know in an instant, what to do during a soccer game, versus the free-style action of practicing. This increase in performance is triggered by an expectation and focus of your attention. Similarly, to get the attention and best efforts of employees, meetings should include designed timed activities.
Managers of production learn early that standards like instructions, training requirements, cycle times, units per hour, etc. increase output and quality; this goes up even higher with timely performance feedback. The average employee spends three hours in meetings per week, and spends four hours prepping, and many of us experience a much higher frequency. So why do we so often head into meetings with ambiguous expectations and no time-discrete standards for output? It really is no mystery that 71% of meetings are considered unproductive and cost around $37 billion dollars annually; we have designed them that way.
But there is a simple meeting format change that can dramatically increase the productivity of your meetings. That impactful change is the use of timed activities to generate learning, thinking, and collaboration.
A meeting should consist of questions to answer. Great facilitators know the best way to generate options and the best decision, is through timed activities like splat, priority matrix, rich picture, polarity cycle, timeline, affinity diagram, systems mapping, etc. that get people out of their chairs, participating in, not just attending the meeting. There is a pretty obvious reason timed activities generate higher level output.
Timed activities trigger an environmental competitive response. This is one of the reasons at PLS Management Consulting, we refer to meetings as an arena-check out our engagement and collaboration training here. When people shift from attending and listening to participating in a meeting, particularly as a group, this triggers a biological response that prepares us for a challenge, activating the sympathetic nervous system, which increases arousal, heart rate, blood pressure, and glucose levels. In a safe environment, this can enhance our mental abilities, increase our performance, and help us cope with stress and uncertainty.
Notice I said the benefits are achieved in a safe environment. Timed activities in the wrong environment are not always beneficial for group performance. Sometimes, those feelings of competition can have negative effects, such as anxiety, aggression, cheating, or reduced cooperation. This is why it is important to have the entire team (every member!) tooled up in engagement practices, that the nature of the tasks and the level of difficulty be appropriate to the team, and the team culture is one that is based on the value of multiple perspectives, transparency, emancipation, devolution, and inclusion.
Some other benefits of mimicking competition through timed activities is that it increases our intrinsic motivation, which is the desire to do something for its own sake, rather than for external rewards or pressures. Intrinsic motivation can generate creativity, curiosity, and joy. This is why you just feel great when you leave a good meeting! What's more, competition psychology can also increase our achievement goals, which are the standards that we set for ourselves and use to evaluate our competence. Achievement goals can be either mastery-oriented or performance-oriented. While performance goals focus on demonstrating superior ability or outperforming others, if you can get more employees to seek personal mastery, then goal-focus is on learning, improving, and mastering a task. Either way, you enhance output by positively, impacting quality and quantity of options and outcomes.
There are other benefits to timed activities and visualizations that evolve around expanding mental capacity, thought flow, and speed of information sharing and learning. When companies have penetrating agile, they utilize timed activities and visualizations to bring out the best in their teams. Join them, and will quickly realize step-ahead outcomes are hidden within your employees.
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