On the way to work one morning, a man said to his friend, “I’m really looking forward to going to work today.”
“Why?” asked his friend.
“Because I don’t have a single meeting today, so I can really get some work done.”
If you and your team members can relate to this feeling, it’s probably a good time to take a hard look at why, how and how often you have meetings.
Here are some tips to make your meetings more productive.
1. Understand the goal of the meeting. There are several good reasons to have a meeting. Possibilities may include sharing important information, coordinating activities among a group or tapping into skill sets to solve a problem. If you can’t clearly state a goal for your meeting, you don’t need to have it.
For example, “We just like to get everyone together from time to time” is not a clear goal. “We want to share the results of the first quarter and communicate our goals for second quarter” is a clear goal.
2. Decide who really needs to attend. Again, there are several good reasons to invite participants. Such reasons may be the attendees have or need the information that will be shared, will be involved in the activities being planned or have the special skills or expertise needed.
Groups of more than 10 people are difficult to manage, particularly if discussion is needed. If you do have to include more than 10 people, manage your agenda carefully and keep the group on task.
Make sure one or two people in the room don’t dominate the discussion. If you’ve asked someone to be at the meeting, make sure that person has opportunities to share.
3. Prepare a timed agenda. Decide what needs to be covered in relation to the goal you set in Step 1.
Break the topics into reasonable bites and allocate a certain amount of time to discuss each one. Be realistic. Take into consideration the size of the group, the complexity of the topic and the likelihood of a variety of opinions on the topic. The idea is not to keep people from having time to share. The object is to stay focused on the purpose of the meeting and to give more time to the more important elements of the discussion.
Learn more tips on creating efficient meetings.
It’s been 28 years since Michael Doyle and David Straus wrote their groundbreaking book, How To Make Meetings Work (1976). Are you like many of my clients who gripe about numbing, deadening meetings? As one publication put it, “days, weeks, months, years of our lives are slipping away in stuffy, overcrowded conference rooms”. Little appears to be accomplished and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.
Doyle and Straus claimed that there were 11 million meetings in the US every day in 1976. Doyle says that there are 25 million today and most of them don’t work. If you calculate how much productive time plus lost wages accrue to those sitting in the room, a truly staggering figure emerges.
Fortunately there are answers for this dilemma. Let me offer you ten tips for turning around your unproductive meetings.
1. Is the meeting necessary?
Let’s start with a fundamental-and radical- question: Is your meeting necessary? A meeting largely serves two important business purposes: sharing information or making a decision. Can some other method of information sharing/decision making be used? Meetings are often held because “it’s time for our meeting” with very little thought spent in what will actually happen. So rethink if you even need to hold it.
2. Send an Agenda in Advance
If you do decide to hold the meeting, send an agenda at least three days in advance. The agenda should be clear about what the meeting results should be, how people should prepare and what roles they will play. Show how the meeting connects with other meetings that may have contributed to the issues that will beaddressed. Ask for feedback. The three days allow for modifications if needed.
And don’t forget to connect the meeting with the larger mission and vision of the organization. This creates and reinforces the much-needed larger context for the meeting.
3. Start and End on Time
Not doing this just (starting on time) reinforces the latecomers and punishes those who arrive on time. There are few things more maddening then waiting for stragglers and then listening to the half-hearted apologies-or no apologies at all.
Ending on time indicates that you value people’s work that must be done after the meeting. Unfinished items can be carried over as part of the planning for the next meeting.
4. Create Ground Rules and Follow Them
These should include:
- Whether “checking in” time should be before or part of the meeting
- Reinforcing starting and ending on time
- Creating a climate of trust where people can speak freely and no one gets hurt
- Setting boundaries around the decision making process. When do you just want information from the group and when do you want a group decision.
5. Appoint a Recorder, Timekeeper and Facilitator
This was Doyle and Straus’ unique contribution to meeting effectiveness. These three roles keep the meeting moving and on track.
- Appoint people to play these roles at each meeting. The roles can be rotated during the meeting if there is an important issue that the role players want to participate in.
- Have the recorder chart (on a flip chart) the “meeting notes” as the meeting progresses. This “public” recording of the meeting eliminates the need for minutes and allows everyone to stay involved by having his or her contributions noted. This method also allows for making corrections on the spot. The notes should be transcribed and made available to all after the meeting.
- The timekeeper notes time allotted for agenda items and makes sure the time is adhered to.
- The facilitator keeps the meeting on track and makes sure the ground rules are followed, participation is wide spread, people are listened to and issues are aired and brought to a conclusion.
6. Plan the Meeting
Review the agenda and the meeting’s purpose. Get agreement on the outcomes to be accomplished by the end of the meeting. Make sure you have genuine buy-in.
7. Appoint a Devil’s Advocate
For each issue discussed, appoint and rotate the role of “devil’s advocate”. Many people will not speak out at meetings for fear of retribution, low group trust or just the fear of looking stupid. As a result “group think” becomes the norm and poor decisions result. By appointing a devil’s advocate, you give official permission for raising differing views.
8. Designate Follow-Up
After an issue is agreed upon, designate:
- Who is responsible
- What they will do
- By when
This is the key issue of accountability. It makes the meeting worthwhile because it results in real organizational change.
9. Do a Meeting Review
On a flip chart sheet, draw a line down the middle. On the top of the left column place a simple plus (+). On the other column, place a delta (∆) (for needs improvement). List group responses to the following:
- Were the outcomes achieved?
- What worked and what didn’t?
- How can the meeting be improved?
Use this information to plan the next meeting.
10. Monitor What Happens After the Meeting
Note the water cooler/coffee machine conversations after the meeting. That’s where the real meeting analysis often comes out. Comments made away from a meeting — negative or positive — do not contribute to the meeting’s productivity. If you hear such comments, figure out a way to bring that information to the next meeting. It may require a revision of the ground rules so people feel safe to discuss the real issues.
Meetings don’t have to be the horrible experience that they often are. By following these tips, your meetings and your organizational results will improve.
Using web conferencing solutions is an excellent way to smooth the progress of negotiating various business deals and coming to a joint consensus during a meeting. Online meeting tools make it possible for several people in different locations all around the globe to participate in Internet events, share files and documents and attend live meetings.
Tips for a Successful Meeting
Just like a traditional business meeting, a live meeting must run smooth in order to be effective. Here are some tips to help you organize your next online meeting for maximum success:
- Fix any technical problems ahead of time.
Nothing will kill an online meeting faster than waiting twenty minutes for a technical problem to be corrected. The point of most business meetings is to impress the prospects, which is difficult to do if your connection keeps cutting in and out or gets lost all together. - Start your meeting on time.
The number one rule of live meetings is to always begin on time. It is important for you to be sitting at your desk or conference table ready to pay attention at least ten minutes before the agreed meeting time. Take this time to get into the meeting zone and mentally and physically prepare your presentation. - Make sure your online meeting is interesting.
Be sure that all of the content that you include in your presentations and speeches for your live meetings are packed full of interesting facts and data. Keep things moving along at a comfortable pace. Do not focus too much on a single topic and move from one subject to the next with calculated ease.
Web conferencing companies provide users with everything they need to access a number of different facilities with a broad range of conferencing software. In addition to offering some of the latest and greatest in web conferencing equipment and services, companies like RHUB also offer customers cost effective deals. Cost effectiveness is one of the main attractions to online conferencing.
The use of video conferencing equipment is becoming ever more common with businesses around the globe today. By using this kind of technology, organizations in today’s society stand to gain loads of perks as a result. They are able to cut down the amount they shell out every year upon travel and time lost in production with staff being away from the office. Plus it goes without saying owing to application of this equipment they are helping to cut back their carbon footprint (less traveling incurred) so are helping to undertake their small piece for the natural environment.
When you are holding meetings with this type of tools, there are several things that you need to think about and commit to memory. By means of reading this article you will be given a few ideas that could be functional for in the future.
Tip 1 – It is completely crucial for you to lay down some ground rules for the conference before you start it in order to make sure that it flows smoothly and what it’s essential to get achieved through it truly gets done.
Tip 2 – Do not actually start the gathering until you’ve checked to guarantee that everybody that must be heard is heard by everybody involved in the meeting. If you happen to run into an issue then either have the individual shift to where they might be seen if it is visual, or have them converse if it is audio. This can also be the time when you should permit them to test the equipment out so that they can familiarize themselves with it and how it is set up.
Tip 3 – You may feel the urge to wander around the room as you talk with others with your video teleconferencing equipment, but try to restrict how much you move. This type of activity can be very unproductive as it can disrupt the attendees of the meeting.
Tip 4 – When you are speaking it is important to remember to enunciate you words clearly and slowly so that no person attending will have any difficulty understanding you. Don’t interrupt someone who is speaking as this can disrupt the sound and make it difficult to understand for the other people. Whenever you are talking at your video conferencing equipment it is important that you consciously make sure that you voice is directed into the microphone at all times so you can be heard clearly through all connections.
Tip 5 – If there is more than one person that is going to be a part of the presentation, then when you are done speaking it is a good idea to mute your microphone. By doing this you will assure that there will not be any disruption to what the other speaker has to say or when someone has a question.
These tips will allow you to hold a meeting that will not only allow your message to get across smoothly, it will be pleasant for the attendees as well. Other than the technological standpoint it is simply using good manners.
As business expands, business meetings become via the web becomes the norm, and the ability and resources to gather all members of a team together for these meetings becomes much more difficult. The question we need to ask is how do we ensure that our remote co-workers are engaged even though they may be thousands of miles apart. The ideal solution to this problem is to include them virtually, but this poses some obstacles that need to be addressed.
Most of us have a natural tendency to interact and engage with people we can physically see. So, during meetings with both onsite and virtual members, it is crucial to be make special efforts to be inclusive to the offsite members. We recommend 5 tips to help your onsite and offsite members feel included:
Tip #1: Create a graphical depiction of the group.
There are three reasons why we do this
- It is a reminder that we are connected even though we are not in the same location
- It allows the meeting leader and team members to keep track of who is actually in the meeting.
- If you have some people who are joining a face to face meeting remotely, it serves as a reminder that the remote people are also part of the meeting. We suggest having someone draw the team display on a flip chart on the wall so that all the members of the group in the room can see who is in the meeting.
Tip #2: Engage all the members of the meeting
We suggest every 3 slides or every 6 minutes to ask people for their input, conduct a poll or ask a question.
Tip #3: Structure the meeting to encourage the input of offsite members
Another strategy to ensure the inclusion of virtual team members is to structure the meeting primarily to encourage their input. This can be done through the discussion of issues that primarily affect the virtual team members. Since the topic is particularly applicable to them they will be encouraged to provide their own insight and participate in the discussion.
Tip #4: Limit the members to only those who are relevant
To add to the efficiency, it is important to include only those participants relevant to the meeting. This is particularly important for the offsite members, since they will feel alienated when the discussion does not even concern them. Keeping only relevant members at meetings will remove unneeded distractions and save time.
Tip#5: Establish relationships with the team
Our fifth tip is to spend time building relationships with the members. Studies tell us that virtual teams that trust tend to collaborate more effectively. One way to build trust is by spending time building relationships. We suggest you spend 5 minutes at the beginning of every meeting touching base with each other and it can be as simple as asking people to:
- Tell you one thing about your cultural heritage?
- Tell us one idiosyncrasy that others need to know in order to work more effectively together
- Conduct a team energizer
By following these 5 tips your team meetings will be optimized and the team can work at its full potential.