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Meetings could be the most productive part of your day, as well as the least productive. The C-suite typically spends around 72% of the time in meetings. You can reduce your meeting time by 94% applying SMED.
When a meeting is well organized, you can get tons of ideas, energy and action plans out of it. Especially if you are working remotely, meetings are the perfect time to foster the personal connection, share issues on a timely basis and explore suggestions.
But you can also get employee’s time and attention stuck with no result. Hundreds of unproductive hours a year per employee are lost waiting for other attendees, looking for documents during the meeting, repeating topics, extending discussions without agreeing on a clear action plan, missing key decision-makers or holding attendees that don’t participate.
It is your role as a leader to ensure meetings are the most productive part of the day for everyone involved. Your team will develop better ideas, increase engagement and improve collaboration, while you will be reducing your meeting time significantly.
The proposed solution is to SMED your meeting. SMED stands for single-minute exchange of dies, a method widely used in manufacturing to improve changeover time. In Ford-T times, all cars where black to avoid spending two weeks in changeover time to use a different die. Until Toyota’s engineer, Shigeo Shingo, came up with SMED to reduce the process to 3 minutes.
Experience shows that change over time can be dramatically reduced as much as 94%. Formula 1 cars use it to improve tires’ changeover time. For many people, changing a single tire can easily take 15 minutes. For a NASCAR pit crew, changing four tires takes less than 15 seconds.
Southwest can “changeover” an airplane between flights in less than 30 minutes. Airlines make money when their planes are in the air. They do not make money waiting at a gate. You don’t make money when you are witing for a meeting to start either, so follow these five steps:
1) Identify a pilot meeting. Choose a periodic meeting that you consider is not efficient and focus on improving it first, don’t start with all the sessions at once. Choose a team that will help improve it. It is recommended that you have some of the current participants and some external participants or facilitators to help you figure out what could work differently.
2) Identify elements. In this step, the team dissects all of the elements of the meeting: discussions, people talking, voting time, note-taking, waiting time, silence time, idea generation, etc. The most effective way of doing this is to record with your phone one of the meetings, and also have observers taking notes, and then work from the recording to create an ordered list of elements. The elements should include the description of what’s being done, and the cost in time spent. Observers can also identify attendees that are not participating, attendees that are distracted or multitasking, estimate time lost waiting for the meeting to start, or employees that are taking over most of the time of the meeting or intimidating others (HIPPO effect), for example.
3) Identify external tasks: In this step, identify those tasks that could be done at another time, not during the meeting. External tasks could be done before the meeting, such as retrieving documents, approving previous meeting minutes, getting information, contacting employees that are not present, or preparing the agenda with the topics to discuss. Some tasks that could be done after the meeting are discussing issues in detail, preparing the minutes or checking the status of a report. Most of the time lost during sessions is part of these external elements. While they are in progress, attendees are waiting, and time is lost for everyone, while it could only be spent by one of the team members or eliminated.
4) Convert Internal Elements to External. In this step, the meeting is analyzed to convert as many internal elements to external as possible. A meeting that includes several team members, including managers, should be reduced to the minimum amount of internal tasks, while all the rest of the time is spent individually in preparation and reporting the external tasks.
Decision making or idea generation are usually internal tasks that need to be done during the meeting, but how can you prepare steps in advance so that they are done faster? You can define or standardize simple voting methods, routines or decision-making processes in advance.
Many companies do standup meetings or mini daily 15-minutes meetings. The routine is always the same: every employee reports, at the end or beginning of the shift, what is done, what needs to be done today, and what are the potential issues. This routine teaches attendees to be prepared and precise, with a short and sweet speech, being able to share their updates in less than a minute.
5) Streamline remaining elements. For each element, the team should ask the following questions: How can this element be completed in less time? How can we simplify this element?
For instance, in remote teams, time is lost due to system issues. You could prevent it by making sure you have the right tools when needed. You can provide information and links in advance so that attendees can download the tool, test it and be ready to use it during the meeting.
Teams can do a SMED project once for every meeting type, and then they can review it regularly as needed. Scrum teams, for example, do retrospective meetings to review their team process, so it is a good time to keep in mind the SMED principles and identify new external tasks.
The beauty of a SMED meeting is that you are not only cutting unproductive meeting time, but you are also better ready to solve issues during the day, reduce redundancy and engage people to communicate more effectively.
