Meetings could be the most productive part of your day or the least productive. The C-suite typically spends around 72% of the time in meetings. Applying SMED can reduce your meeting time by 94%.
When a meeting is well organized, it can generate tons of ideas, energy, and action plans. Meetings are the perfect time to foster personal connection, share issues promptly, and explore suggestions, especially if you are working remotely.
However, you can also waste employees’ time and attention without a result. Hundreds of unproductive hours a year per employee are lost waiting for other attendees, looking for documents during the meeting, repeating topics, extending discussions without agreeing on a clear action plan, missing key decision-makers or holding attendees who don’t participate.
It is your role as a leader to ensure meetings are the most productive part of the day for everyone involved. Your team will develop better ideas, increase engagement and improve collaboration, while you will significantly reduce your meeting time.
The proposed solution is to SMED your meeting. SMED stands for single-minute exchange of dies, a method widely used in manufacturing to improve changeover time. In Ford-T times, all cars were black to avoid spending two weeks in changeover time to use a different die. This was until Toyota’s engineer, Shigeo Shingo, developed SMED to reduce the process to three minutes.
Experience shows that change over time can be dramatically reduced by as much as 94%. Formula 1 cars use this to improve tire changeover time. For many people, changing a single tire can easily take 15 minutes. For a Formula 1 pit crew, changing four tires takes less than 3 seconds.
Southwest can “change over” an airplane between flights in less than 30 minutes. Airlines make money when their planes are in the air. They do not make money waiting at a gate. You don’t make money when you are waiting for a meeting to start either, so follow these five steps:
1) Identify a pilot meeting. Choose a periodic meeting that you consider inefficient and focus on improving it first. Don’t start with all the sessions at once. Choose a team that will help improve it. You should have some of the current participants and some external participants or facilitators to help you figure out what could work differently.
2) Identify elements. In this step, the team dissects all of the elements of the meeting: discussions, people talking, voting time, note-taking, waiting time, silence time, idea generation, etc. The most effective way of doing this is to record one of the meetings with your phone, have observers take notes, and then work from the recording to create an ordered list of elements. The elements should include a description of what’s being done and the cost of time spent. Observers can also identify attendees that are not participating, attendees that are distracted or multitasking, estimate time lost waiting for the meeting to start, or employees that are taking over most of the time of the meeting or intimidating others (HIPPO effect), for example.
3) Identify external tasks: In this step, identify those tasks that could be done at another time, not during the meeting. External tasks could be done before the meeting, such as retrieving documents, approving previous meeting minutes, getting information, contacting employees that are not present, or preparing the agenda with the topics to discuss. Some tasks that could be done after the meeting are discussing issues in detail, preparing the minutes or checking the status of a report. Most of the time lost during sessions is part of these external elements. While they are in progress, attendees are waiting, and time is lost for everyone, while it could only be spent by one of the team members or eliminated.
4) Convert Internal Elements to External. This step analyzes the meeting to convert as many internal elements to external as possible. A meeting that includes several team members, including managers, should be reduced to the minimum amount of internal tasks, while all the rest of the time is spent individually in preparation and reporting the external tasks.
Decision-making or idea generation are usually internal tasks that need to be done during the meeting, but how can you prepare steps in advance so that they are done faster? You can define or standardize simple voting methods, routines or decision-making processes in advance.
Many companies hold standup meetings or mini-day 15-minute meetings. The routine is always the same: every employee reports, at the end or beginning of the shift, what is done, what needs to be done today, and what are the potential issues. This routine teaches attendees to be prepared and precise, with a short and sweet speech, being able to share their updates in less than a minute.
5) Streamline remaining elements. The team should ask the following questions for each element: How can this element be completed in less time? How can we simplify this element?
For instance, remote teams lose time due to system issues. You could prevent it by ensuring you have the right tools when needed. You can provide information and links in advance so attendees can download the tool, test it and be ready to use it during the meeting.
Teams can do an SMED project once for every meeting type and then review it regularly as needed. Scrum teams, for example, hold retrospective meetings to review their team process, so this is a good time to remember the SMED principles and identify new external tasks.
The beauty of an SMED meeting is that you are not only cutting unproductive meeting time but are also better prepared to solve issues during the day, reduce redundancy and engage people to communicate more effectively.
Recommended Course: Timeboxing
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and need personalized support to streamline your time management, boost productivity, or prepare for the year’s final stretch, consider one-on-one coaching. As a certified career coach, I help high-achieving professionals develop practical strategies tailored to their unique needs, from timeboxing to overcoming burnout. Let’s work together to help you achieve your goals with less stress and more confidence.
