I heard a tale the other day of someone’s distress at the amount of meetings they are expected to attend – not just in a working week, but often on the same day. After we’d talked about possibilities for reducing them – and much of that could only be done in their particular case through a huge culture change within their department – I started to wonder how meetings might be done differently to ease the burden on those who are expected to attend every one, and also to run them more effectively.

You can probably come up with a few ideas yourself – maybe you have already. And I wonder if any of those included making better use of technology to hold your meeting remotely? Especially useful – even necessary – of course, when working from home, but how about at other times? How about instead of travelling to a location on your office site, you hold a video call? No need to book a large room to accommodate people, and with just a few clicks you could probably gather together quite a few people online and even reduce the meeting time. Then there’s the option to use online chat to share documents or to make a comment that everyone can follow along with, without feeling you’re interrupting the flow of the speaker.

Clever eh? Worth a try? What have you got to lose? It might just make next week at work a whole lot easier.