Most professionals dread meetings not only because they typically last too long, but also because they feel pointless and tend to hijack other priorities. Ben Wolf, an EOS Implementer^® at Wolf’s Edge Consulting, believes you can change this by implementing three critical strategies based on the Entrepreneurial Operating System^® (EOS^®) framework. He shares how to take your team’s meetings from “level 4” to “level 10.”

We know how maddening, frustrating and, yes, boring meetings are at many organizations. They occur too often, feel like a waste of time and hijack your other priorities. The good news is that with a few tweaks, you can implement a meeting structure that will take your meetings from a level 3 or 4 in effectiveness to a 10.

Patrik Hall, a professor in political science at Malmö University in Sweden, wrote that most employees feel disengaged and frustrated with meetings because they fail to lead to concrete action or measurable output.

A study of over 2,000 employees at organizations across Europe found that people spent an average of 187 hours per year—the equivalent of 23 days—in meetings. Worse still, 56 percent rated those meetings “unproductive.” And a Harvard Business Review survey of 200 executives in a wide variety of industries found that only 17 percent of those questioned rated their meetings “productive” for the team or individuals involved.