142 - Changing a Meeting Culture from Within, at Scale with Sonja Hanau

Sonja Hanau is the person 99% of working professionals have prayed for at one point or another.

For Sonja is a Meeting Designer. In fact, Sonja is one of the best Meeting Designers you’ll ever meet.

And she’s the guest on this week’s episode, bringing her startling wisdom and clarity to our conversation in a way that truly energised me.

We discuss everything from the big picture of the future of work and how meetings work in it, to the minutiae of how she creates training sessions to empower companies to improve their meetings at scale.

Find out about:

• Three key rules for creating better meetings
• Why companies have bad meetings and what they can do to change it
• What goes into Sonja’s corporate meeting design training sessions, from technical videos to experience design
• How the changing world of work and our relationships with our jobs is changing how we meet
• Why it’s essential to have both an online and offline facilitator in hybrid meetings
• How one question at the end of your next meeting could totally change your meeting culture

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Questions and Answers

[01:08] When did you start calling yourself a facilitator?

[02:58] What’s the story behind your role of Meeting Designer in a corporate setting?

[06:24] Why do corporates have such bad meetings – and are there any quick fixes for them?

[10:12] What does it take for managers and team leaders to embrace a new way of doing meetings?

[15:00] What is something you have learned to implement after watching your son’s online classes?

[16:38] How do you balance giving people the space to honour their feelings whilst also not wanting to disturb the flow of the wider group?

[19:30] You’ve delivered training sessions to teach teams the art of designing, hosting, and facilitating better meetings at scale. How was this? What did you learn?

[23:40] Which parts are best done independently, and which are best done together?

[30:03] Is there a way that corporates can quantitatively measure the impact of learning to hold better meetings?

[33:27] Would you say that, as meeting quality goes up, meeting quantity/frequency goes down?

[35:09] Is the changing world of work – and our perspectives about being ‘busy’ – changing the nature of meetings?

[39:57] What makes a meeting fail?

[42:11] What are your thoughts on hybrid? Is it the future in corporate? What else might it be?

[46:37] Do you have a favourite hybrid exercise?

[49:35] Was there anything else that you wanted to bring to this conversation that we haven’t covered yet?

[52:47] What is the one thing you would like listeners to take away from this episode?

Links

Subscribe to her meeting inspiration (english) -  7 mistakes a meeting facilitator shouldn't do (substack.com)

Subscribe to her meeting inspiration (german) -  Meetingschmiede | Einfach gute Meetings

Connect to Sonja:

On LinkedIn

Any thoughts? Share them with us!

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👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/  👈