Meetings have become a point of frustration for people in many organizations. The complaints are many and varied. Some of the problems include lack of preparation, which is one of the biggest causes of meetings and, taking too much time in meetings, monopolization, lack of focus, and regular meetings and this eventually lacks effective communication in a meeting.

These are all valid issues that make meeting another boring event for many people in different organizations.

These issues need to be tackled to make meetings effective and fruitful. One problem that stands out among them that needs immediate attention is the issue of monopolization in meetings.

Monopolization is common in big meetings where an individual or group of individuals choose chooses to take over the whole meeting and act like they understand the issue at hand than any other person. They will tend to dominate the discussions and give any other member little or no time to give their contribution or put across their points.

The issue here is that it makes other members feel inferior and get intimidated. Also, they will refrain from contributing and act as the meeting has no bearing on their lives. This refrain will lead to organizing ineffective meetings over time.

Monopolization also minimized the ability to achieve the aim of the meeting. It also gives rise to disharmony among the members, making it hard to achieve organizational goals and objectives.

Nevertheless, organizations can handle monopolization in several ways

1. Create Ground Rules: One of the ways to reduce monopolization is by creating ground rules that will guide each meeting. The employers should create a list of the possible problem behaviors that affect your meeting, and describe their effect on decision making. Then, you can create rules that will prevent those behaviors. Next, you should organize a meeting to discuss the problem behaviors and propose ground rules.
2. Take responsibility for your meetings: As an employee or employer, you need to know that when you permit the wrong behavior, you are endorsing it. Start by acknowledging that when you accept bad norms, you are reinforcing them. Change this by meeting the leaders and suggesting ways that monopolization can be reduced. Don’t play the blame game. You are also responsible for the outcomes of your meetings. Your suggestion can go along way in reducing the incidence of monopolization in your organization.
3. Ensure that Everyone is Pre informed about the Agenda: Ensure that every participant in the meeting gets the meeting plan at least one day before the meeting. It will be essential if you have introverted staff members who would love to prepare beforehand.
4. Use an agenda with topics and Time Limits: Every agenda should have time estimates for each topic. Participants will then use the time limits for proper time management during the meeting.
5. Hold People Accountable: When people begin to deviate from the ground rules, you can call them back. For example, if you set a two-minute speaking rule for each speaker and someone exceeds it, you can call back the attention of that person by reminding them of the ground rules.
6. Create a two-minute speaking rule to force people to be concise: Create a two-minute rule that will make everyone speak concisely. This will help to avoid monopolization during meetings and give others speaking time as well. After a person has spoken, allow other people to speak as well before allowing the first person to talk again.
7. Take notes on a whiteboard or flip chart: Write down the person’s point, then stop them from repeating their points.
8. Use an app that will regulate speaking time in meetings: This is another effective way of handling monopolization in meetings. This option is currently not widely used, but it is a viable means of controlling most challenges and issues in meetings, including monopolization.

Why Apps that Regulate Speaking Time in Meetings are Important

4. It will ensure broad participation: If you have a meeting of 120 minutes with 20 people in attendance, how much time will each person get? This will depend on some factors. Some people tend to speak more than others; some speak longer than others, which can lead to resentment in the organization. How do you solve this problem? Use an app that regulates effective communication time for each person to only two minutes.
5. Reduce Resentments: Meetings are a source of resentment for many workers. They are not heard, they are not allowed to make their points, they are not allowed to make meaningful contributions, only a few people take the floor and decide, while others serve as onlookers. You can eliminate these complaints by using apps that regulate effective communication times in meetings. With such apps, people will get to voice their opinions and increase their participation.
6. Leads to Fruitful Meetings: A lot of meetings in organizations are not fruitful. This is due to several reasons such as domination by one or two persons, ineffective handling of the boss’s meeting, not discussing real issues, distractions, and monotonous conversations that lead to nowhere.
7. Ensure that everyone voices their opinion on difficult issues: With time regulating apps, every member of staff will have the opportunity to say their mind even on difficult subjects. Instead of avoiding the problematic issues and going in circles, choose to speak about the problems and handle them with all seriousness.
8. Helps move the organization forward: With the time regulating apps, organizations will move on and develop. When people can contribute and add their quota without disruption, when meetings become more fruitful, the organization will reach better decisions that will help move it forward. They will also be able to get better policies that will help achieve the organization’s corporate goals.
9. Eliminate the Problem of Monopolization: Time regulating apps can help to reduce the issue of monopolization. By ensuring that everyone speaks for only two minutes, other colleagues will get to contribute their quota to the organization’s advancement.

Examples of possible Apps that Regulate Effective Communication Time in Meetings

• ai: A team developed this app at the BBC’s 100 Time challenge to help women speak up at meetings and help others get quiet and listen.

The app was developed to salvage the way women are overlooked and ignored in meetings.

To use the app, you have to open it before going to your meetings. It will show you the part of the meeting where you spoke, and users can use the app to learn to speak up more or support those that are usually ignored when they are speaking during meetings.

At the close of the meeting, All.ai will analyze your voice to know whether you sounded positive or negative, or whether you sounded authoritative or nervous.

• Time to Talk app: This app automatically measures the number of times men and women spend talking in meetings and presents graphs you can easily showcase to the world. It is integrated with Facebook and allows companies, organizations, and private persons to compete for the best equally-shared-time-of-talking-in-meetings-and-discussions.

Time To Talk evaluates the average speaking time for men and women in meetings and is available as an iPhone and iPad app. Conversations are not recorded, only analyzed in real-time, and no data is saved.

While Time To Talk analyzes a conversation, the spectrogram at the top of the screen will be black. As soon as the classification of the sex of the speaker is definitive, the spectrogram will turn blue for women and red for men. Time To Talk analyzes voices based on biological sex.

• Stopwatch apps: You can also use stopwatch apps on your phones to regulate your meetings. You can set them at a two-minute limit, and they will go off at the end of two minutes to signify the end of a meeting.

However, this is a need for other tools that can help regulate speaking time for every participant and ensure that everyone gets their chance to contribute. The apps mentioned above are great, but they have their limitations. There is a need for apps tailored to meetings in organizations and to improve the quality of meetings.

Conclusion

Meetings have become increasingly difficult because of varied reasons ranging from monopolization, lack of preparation, which is one of the biggest causes of meetings, taking too much time in meetings, monopolization, and lack of focus. Many meetings end without concrete results and forward motion. Recently, meetings have been touted to be an effort in futility. However, this can change with effective communication between the employees and employers during meetings. Effective communication can only happen when there is broad participation.

Creating an app that allows people to speak for two minutes in a meeting can help tackle this challenge and give rise to effective meetings.

Therefore, app developers should look into this issue and develop apps to solve this challenge and make meetings effective.