You've scheduled your meeting and the time has come for it to start. You're ready to go as are many of the other attendees and yet again, you have some folks who are straggling in later by five sometimes even ten minutes. In this situation it's hard to get your meeting moving and this causes reverberations throughout the rest of the meeting. There are ways to handle this situation and in today's post we'll be going over many of them.
The first way to address this, is to politely remind everyone that they need to attend the meeting on time. Sometimes this is all it takes to change things for the better but other times it might be helpful to have a short discussion on the topic. You could discuss why folks might be late. Maybe there's another meeting prior that's perpetually going over time, maybe your meeting is the very first one in the morning and the city traffic is erratic enough to cause commute issues or maybe your meeting is on the very opposite end of the building and it's difficult to physically get to the meeting in time. All of these items can easily be remedied from changing your start time, maybe changing the time of day of the meeting or even simply changing the meeting location.
Sometimes though there's a correlation between who's late and their role in the organization. It's not uncommon for organization leaders to perpetually be late to meetings due to conflicts, other meetings going over or hallway conversations causing a distraction to getting to the meeting on time. In this scenario, as much as you might plead with the late birds for their on time arrival, it might do little good. But there are several things you can do to compensate. You could potentially shift your start time to give more time between meetings, such as starting at 10:15 AM instead of 10:00 AM. Or you could move agenda items around so that you can start with those that won't be impacted by those who arrive late. Alternatively, you could pad your agenda with useful but less important agenda items, such as an ice breaker to give a bit of padding prior to starting into the more important items within your agenda.
Depending upon your team culture and dynamics, as well as the type of meeting, you could also add some negative incentives for showing up late. This often takes the form of various rules in order to move people in the direction you want them to go. For example if your team has on-call time, applies for work shifts or has a formal vacation application process, whoever shows up late ends up going to the bottom of the list for these activities. I've been on teams where if you're late you had to put a dollar in the slush fund to help to pay for team events. You can be as creative as you and your meeting attendees want to get, just be professional and remember that there's never a place for something extreme or anywhere near hazing.
Ultimately it will be up to you to decide the best way to address perpetual tardiness. The first step is to acknowledge that it's an issue and that you should take action to try and tamp down the behavior. And once you begin doing so, most of the time the only direction you'll end up is towards the positive. This isn't always an easy conversation, but it's one that can quickly add up by removing distractions from your meetings while simultaneously getting time back to make them more effective.