How to Avoid the Trap of Back-to-back Meetings
Our team often hears a recurring pain-point from our clients: back-to-back meetings without breaks is exhausting and impractical. This pain-point is growing more familiar to many of us as the current pandemic requires us to work remote and meetings are scheduled to compensate for a lack of face-to-face time. When meetings are scheduled back-to-back, one meeting going over the allotted time can have a domino effect on the rest of the day’s meetings, throwing off everyone’s schedule. Even when meetings end as scheduled, often there is no transition time before the next meeting starts. Without time to reset and refocus, employees can experience fatigue and distraction setting in, which can then cause real problems for teams.
We host many meetings and are always looking for ways to alleviate scheduling pain-points. An effective tool that many may not be aware of is the ability to automatically shorten meeting times in Microsoft Outlook to allow for more meeting transition time. You can even choose different standard meeting durations depending on the length of the meeting. The option is also available as an enterprise-wide default for organizations that want to standardize the practice of giving their employees a bit of buffer time.
If you use this option, meeting facilitators still need to make sure meetings end at the scheduled time, but enabling the feature will remind everyone of the importance of having a break in between calls.
How Can We Help You?
Could your organization use a team like ours to help coordinate activities and identify and alleviate pain points? Contact us and let us know how we can help you and your organization achieve greater business and mission success: info@managementstrategies.com.