End the meeting marathons draining your nonprofit’s morale and productivity.

As someone who has the pleasure of attending numerous meetings weekly, I have given a great deal of thought to how we can eliminate unnecessary meetings and make essential meetings more efficient. I believe these are particularly critical considerations for today’s nonprofits, striving to maximize the limited bandwidth of their teams. I recommend all nonprofit leaders ask themselves two questions:


Is your nonprofit holding too many meetings? 

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review pointed out that human time is zero-sum: “Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into time for solo work that’s equally essential for creativity and efficiency.”

In March, Harvard Business Review published striking data on this same topic. First, that 70% of meetings keep employees from doing productive work. Second, that companies found employee productivity was 70% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%. There were also substantial improvements in morale. The article goes on to offer several strategies for scaling back meetings while preserving collaboration and a sense of connection. These included leveraging newer communication tools for brainstorming and staff-manager check-ins. The goal isn’t just to put an end to those “meeting marathon” days of six or eight meetings, one after another. The authors recommend shooting for three meeting-free days a week. 


Could your meetings be more efficient and impactful? 

For any meeting we decide to hold, I believe we should be striving to leave all meeting participants with the feeling that their time was used wisely. In turn, the meeting leader should experience a sense of accomplishment. 

Efficient and effective meetings require commitment to executing well on each of the three phases below. I’ve provided tips, plus links to relevant articles.


Pre-Meeting:  

  • Decide on a purpose. You know the importance of preparing an agenda, but a succinct explanation of why you are bringing these people together and what you hope to achieve is just as important.

  • Structure and design your agenda. Assigning an approximate amount of time and a presenter for each agenda section can help keep you on track, but don’t stop there. Consider creative ways to facilitate any fact-finding or brainstorming that need to take place.

  • Decide on attendees. If someone isn’t essential to driving a meeting’s goals forward,  make their attendance optional.

  • Clarify ground rules. As an organization, it’s valuable to establish common expectations around meeting etiquette. Will you give five minutes of grace for socializing and late arrivers, or start immediately? Will laptops be closed and cell phones turned off? This article from Forbes includes eight meeting ground rules to consider.

  • Give people time to prepare. I like to share my agenda and any supporting materials five days in advance.

Meeting Time:  

  • Test. Perfect your AV delivery before everyone arrives.

  • Facilitate.  Inspire meeting participants with the importance of the task at hand; shepherd everyone towards a goal within an allotted timeframe; get every participant to engage and contribute; and diffuse disagreements. These are skills that take practice to master. This blog post shares insights from a seasoned meeting facilitator.

  • Record. Someone other than the facilitator should take notes, enabling the rest of the group to participate more freely.

  • Redirect.  Great ideas may come up that aren’t relevant to this meeting’s goals. I let their contributor know that I’ve “parked” them on a white board or in meeting notes to be revisited. It’s a gentle way of shifting focus back to the task at hand.

  • Assign. Before you close, make sure action items are clearly defined and appropriately assigned to meeting participants. This New York Times article credits an executive who has coined the acronym W.W.D.W.B.W., short for “Who Will Do What By When.”

Post-Meeting:  

  • Follow up and follow through. You or someone you designate will need to follow up on assigned action items to make sure they are completed and to share results back with meeting participants. Unless this work is done, the meeting’s value will not be fully realized.


    Could your nonprofit use help recording meeting notes or following up on action items?
    A More Than Giving Co. Nonprofit Virtual Assistant (NPVA) can help.

Vicki Burkhart