Boardroom or Bored Room?

A long, dull meeting can make you feel like you’re back in school: watching the clock, struggling to listen – or just to keep your eyes open. Meetings are imperative to keep workplaces functioning and communication flowing, but neither will work if you’re bored to tears.

How to keep your next meeting from turning into naptime?

“Engagement and participation,” Danica Kombol, managing partner at Everywhere, tells PINK. “Meetings need to be collaborative. Any meeting where one person drones on and on is bound to put people to sleep.”

Kombol adds that switching up who runs the meeting instead of one person speaking the whole time keeps things interesting.

Boring Meetings Suck explains how you can keep meetings from zapping energy and productivity by motivating people to wrap it up, having powerful presentations and slipping out briefly to stretch your legs if you feel drowsy.

Others suggest livening things up by including purpose on the agenda, keeping a two-way conversation flow, not getting too off-task and following up on the progress of items discussed at the next meeting.

Roughly 60 percent of people admit to checking their phones during meetings – but Kombol doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. “Since women are natural multi-taskers, I vote for keeping one eye on your laptop or phone and the other on the meeting agenda,” she says. 

Bonus PINK Link: Now that you can overcome boring meetings, what’s next? No more boring suits!

By Caroline Cox

“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we
lose the excitement of possibilities.” Gloria Steinem