The Five Best Reasons to Stand During Meetings
Meetings are overdue for an overhaul. Many employees and employers complain that they’re wastes of time, inefficient, ineffective, or just plain boring. However, when they’re done right, meetings can help facilitate necessary communication, streamline projects, and bring innovative ideas to the table. Would you believe that standing during meetings could actually make them better? It’s true! Here are the 5 best reasons to stand during meetings:
1. No More Complacency: When you’re sitting back in a comfortable chair listening to one person speak you can tend to feel complacent. It’s not your turn to talk so you might take a few notes or, worse, lean away and space out. When everyone is standing during meetings however there’s a feeling that everyone is more involved and that typical complacency that plagues meetings will often disappear completely.
2. Differentiate Your Day: Most technical professionals spend the majority of their days sitting at a computer. When you’re in a meeting you want it to feel like a distinctive, important part of your day and one way to do that is to give it features that differentiate it from the rest of your day. Standing is a great feature to add into a meeting to make it feel unique from your other tasks.
3. Reenergize: Most US employees spend too much of their days sitting at a desk. Countless doctors and studies have recommended that we get up and get moving more often. When you incorporate standing into meetings, you have a small or large (depending on the frequency of your meetings and their length) time of your day that you can automatically guarantee will satisfy the “get up more” aspect of those healthy recommendations. Not only is standing during meetings healthy, it also helps to reenergize you because standing is naturally a more active state than sitting.
4. Shortening: Let’s face it, most meetings could be shorter or even cut in half. Want to shorten your meetings? Make them standing meetings! People will notice how long they’ve been in a room faster if they’re standing the entire time rather than sitting. Think about it, when you’re standing in line at a grocery store it feels infinitely longer than when you’re sitting in a restaurant waiting for food. Standing is a great go to if you want to make sure your overly long meetings get the shortening they so desperately need!
5. Focus: Because people are reenergized and more aware of how time is passing they’re more likely to focus on the task at hand. The increased level of focus is why standing during meetings can often shorten them! If your meetings need a little more focus and a little less meandering, try standing.
In some cases meetings are absolutely necessary. That doesn’t mean they have to be terrible, long, and ineffective though! If you want to address some common meeting pitfalls, try making your next meeting a standing one and see if these 5 things happen for you.