Do This 1 Thing to Make Every Meeting More Productive (and End on Time)- Valutrics

Quick, take a look in your conference room. I’ll wait for a moment.

See anything unusual in there?

Something that might be hurting the productivity of your team or making meetings last much longer than they should? (I mean besides the stale donuts.)

I’ll give you a hint.

They have a cushion and a backrest. They tend to encourage people to sit for longer periods than they should, and some are even so comfortable you can take a nap.

That’s right, the chairs in your conference room might be one reason meetings are not that productive and take way too long. As a radical step, consider removing them even for a week and see what happens. I’m serious! You can always retrofit the room with a standing desk conference room table and add stools like the ones from Steelcase or Herman Miller. Strangely, in all of my working life, I have yet to attend a formal standing meeting in a conference room. I’ve certainly attended meetings where people stand in the hallway, the break-room, or in the lobby.

Why are they rare? For one, the desks and stools are more expensive than anything you will find in comparison to the seat squatter models out there.

Yet, studies show that sitting all day–at your desk, in meetings, and in your car on the way home–is terrible for your long-term health. Slightly less important than those health issues is the fact that standing meetings make everyone more productive. We think differently. I know this since I’ve been standing at a desk for the past few months. I’ve even had phone meetings, Skype conferences, and in-person meetings around my standing desk. You get more energetic, more motivated–you even act a bit more decisively. If you take a rather dim view of how this works, maybe it’s because we all want to stop standing and finish up the discussion. I think it’s due to how we interact with each other, don’t slump, and stay more engaged.

I’ve heard that Japanese automakers will sometimes have standing meetings in a conference room, although it is mostly to encourage short discussions. When you are standing, you can make a quick exit and move onto other things. However, in my experience, not having chairs at a meeting also encourages people to get to the point. We’re not in a leisurely frame of mind, we’re in action mode. In a chair, we slump back, sip coffee, and think about lunch. Standing up, we suddenly react faster to ideas. We’re in more of a high alert mode, which is perfect for meetings.

Another benefit to this is that the meetings don’t last as long. People get right to the point, they discuss topics faster, they are ready to embrace new concepts, and then they are ready to get back to work. It is the perfect model for smaller offices where people might not have the space to use a standing desk all day but can “sit and stand” in intervals by attending standing meetings in the conference room. I’ve even heard of at least one company that took all of the chairs out of a conference room because an employee who is pregnant prefers to stand. Seems legit, huh?

Will you try my idea? Maybe you have heard of it before, but over the past decade or two, I’ve rarely seen this practice. I’ve visited hundreds and hundreds of startups and have yet to see one standing meeting room where everyone met without any chairs.

If you do try the idea and go the chairless route for a week, please send me the results of your experiment. I want to know how it goes and include some findings in a follow-up post. Also, get rid of those stale donuts.