As its name suggests, a stand-up meeting is a meeting that takes place while everyone is standing. Many companies, such as Google and Facebook, are implementing stand-up meetings in order to have more efficient and practical meetings, making them more and more popular by the day. This format of meetings has several benefits for both your employees and your organization. Check these benefits out.
Speed up Meetings
Several studies have shown that stand-up meetings are, in more cases, much shorter than sit-down meetings. Melissa Dahl from the New York Magazine wrote that meetings are 34% shorter if you’re standing up, this was based on a paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1999. This study showed that not only sit-down meetings are longer, but they also do not necessarily produce better-quality outcomes.
Traditional forms of meetings tend to take and waste a lot of valuable time for the organization as people often get off-topic. Another reason for this waste of time is that a conventional meeting encourages a laid-back approach instead of efficient concentration from the team.
Improve Productivity
Being in a standing position increases the participants’ attention and optimizes information retention as it is less likely that employees will get distracted. Also, attendees are keen to go back to their workstation and sit down, as a result, they tend to make decisions more quickly and ideas turn faster into actions. Moreover, working while standing supports creative thinking, decreases distraction, and keep attendees more alert.
Lorraine Twohill, Google’s head of Marketing, has between 17 and 20 meetings per day, and she is “obsessive about making meetings highly productive.” She handles her meetings with stand-up meetings or walking one-on-one.
Enhance Team’s Involvement
Stand-up meetings encourage the expression of thoughts and idea sharing, as well as collaboration and participation within the team. Another advantage is that hierarchies are somehow less visible, decreasing in that sense dominating behavior while promoting a feeling of inclusion and importance in the team members. As everyone feels involved, individual commitment increases.
Good for Your Health
We cannot stress enough the importance of decreasing the time we spend on a chair. According to research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four Americans spend more than 8 hours sitting every day. This sedentary behavior has been associated with increased mortality, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and poor mental health outcome.
By having stand-up meetings, you will create a more active working environment providing a healthy balance between standing up and sitting down. Remember that the working space should be adapted to the people and not the other way around.
Raise the productivity of your meetings to a new level.
