POST MEthod for meetings
Project Summary
The POST Method is a plan that outlines how to structure meetings in an effort to ensure that meetings run efficiently. My infographic outlines how to utilize the POST method and provides support for organizational leaders who have a knowledge gap with how to conduct virtual meetings effectively.
If applied correctly, this knowledge can help reduce the number of unnecessary meetings that waste valuable time and money while increasing efficiency when meetings are actually necessary.
A huge problem for businesses:
If you’re reading this, there’s a high chance that the phrase “that could’ve been an email” resonates with you. A lot of businesses have shifted to remote work, therefore more meetings are being conducted virtually. Yet, the issue of meetings being considered “time-wasters” originated long before the pandemic occurred.
According to a survey conducted by Organizational Psychologist, Steven Rogelberg, most employees considered only 50 percent of the meetings they attended to be time well-spent. This meant the other 50 percent of meetings were deemed wasteful.
To put this into perspective: imagine you spend 12 hours in meetings every single week. This amounts to 48 hours every month, which accumulates to about 576 hours a year. If 50 percent of that time is spent being unproductive, you have now wasted 288 hours (which equates to 36 full working days) accomplishing nothing. That’s more than 7 weeks of time that could be used to achieve business goals such as meeting deadlines and completing projects, improve employee and company performance, or improve overall work-life balance!
Research & Analysis
I too have endured my fair share of unproductive meetings and had my opinions on why they were such a drag. However, in order to avoid operating with Confirmation Bias, I decided to get insight from others.
First, I spoke to 2 Project Managers about how they navigated the shift to conducting meetings virtually. Both managers discussed the challenges and frustrations they faced while conducting effective virtual meetings due to the pandemic. The first project manager I spoke to mentioned that he was taught to use the POST method. Since implementing this practice, he’s been able to cut down the number of meetings he schedules and shorten the length of his meetings.
Next, I continued to look into the research conducted by Steven Rogelberg. He noted that, “only 20 percent of leaders ever receive any training on how to run a meeting” [and] … simply creating an agenda is not enough. Leaders need to know what questions to ask. Rogelberg also stated that Parkinson's Law can be credited for why meetings last for an hour when they don’t need to.
The main takeaway was that if you’re going to plan a meeting, make sure it’s structured by using the POST method method. If you are unable to answer the questions outlined by this method, then you don’t need to schedule a meeting.
Solution & Design
Training is helpful, but it’s also costly and not always necessary. I used action mapping to determine what solution would need to be implemented. Coupled with my research and the discovery I made during my conversations with the project managers, I determined that there was a knowledge gap with how to prepare for and conduct meetings effectively and storing the knowledge on a job aid would be the best immediate solution.
I created a job aid that not only explained what the POST method was but also included how to implement each step correctly with what questions to ask along the way. I designed the job aid on Canva, asked for feedback, and revised the infographic with the feedback I was given.
Implementation & Outcome
The second Project Manager I spoke to during the research phase, used the infographic I created.
She found the questions included with each step to be very helpful and was able to successfully decrease the amount of time spent conducting her own meetings by 13-20% so far (8-12 minutes for reference).
Although she is still working on getting traditional members of upper management to see the value in scheduling less meetings, she has set a personal goal of running her meetings effectively enough to decrease meeting times by 33-50% within the next 6 months.
Continuous Improvement
Ideally, using the infographic would help improve meeting effectiveness. Although utilizing the POST method is a good place to start, there are a few barriers to successful implementation.
Prioritization skills: if a leader does not know how to prioritize action items or determine which tasks are relevant, they may not be able to create an agenda correctly.
Facilitation skills: if a leader lacks the ability to manage time or finds it difficult to keep other meeting attendees on task, meetings will continue to be ineffective.
A suggestion would be to set up a system for observation and evaluation (from both peers and attendees) to see if leaders are able to facilitate meetings effectively with the proposed solution. If it is determined that leaders have a skill gap in meeting facilitation, THEN there can be a discussion of using training to fix the issue.