What
are the purposes of a meeting?
Analysis —highly complex situations may require multiple
subject matter experts. Frequently experts have their own vernacular or
vocabulary, and a meeting is appropriate to homogenize understanding and
agreement. Have you ever run a meeting with PhD engineers and creative
marketing folks together? Sometimes it sounds like they are from
different planets.
Assignments —structured meetings or workshops provide an
excellent means of building agreement around roles and responsibilities.
When using the FAST technique, you can leave the meeting with a consensually
built GANTT chart, estimation of resource requirements, and approximation of
budget needs.
Decision-Making —since resources typically fall short of
the demands, prioritization is critical for high group performance. No
team has the time or resource to do everything. Consensual understanding
around prioritization provides one of the best justifications for hosting a
meeting or workshop.
Idea Generation —the reason that groups are smarter than
the smartest person in the group is because groups create more options than
simply aggregating the input of participants. Many of the best ideas did
not walk into the meeting; rather they were created during the meeting, based
on stimulation from others.
Information Exchange —by far and away the most common
reason for meetings is also one of the worst possible reasons for justifying a
meeting. With instant access and electronic filing cabinets, coming
together face-to-face is a very expensive way to exchange information. A
better justification would be to address questions about clarity, agreement,
and omissions of related information or the impact the information ought have
on the behavior of participants.
Inspiration and Fun —meetings can be effectively used to
both reward, incent, and incite but usually on a large-scale that involve
complimentary events or sessions that also involve learning and building
teamwork.
Persuasion —probably the worst reason for holding a
meeting is to convince other people to change their behavior. There are
three primary forms of persuasion; namely identification (eg, advertising),
internalization (ie, long-lasting), and forced-compliance (ie, “gun to the
head”). Meetings are sub-optimal for all three forms of persuasion, and
therefore are rarely successful at persuasion.
Relationships —simply pulling together people
face-to-face provides the glue that can pull people together and get them to
work more cooperatively. Frequently venting, or managing conflict, can
result in increased effectiveness. Probably the best time to invest in
face-to-face meetings is when people don’t agree with each other and need to
both reconcile their points of view and agree to move on.
What
makes a good meeting ?
Here
are 5 steps to great meetings:
1: Consider your desired outcome.
Before you reserve a room and send out invitations, take
a few moments to consider why you want to call your meeting in the first place.
Who should be present? What outcomes do you expect as a result of the meeting?
What impact do you hope to have? As with any tool, meetings yield desirable
results only when their limitations are taken into consideration.
A timely email, picking up the phone, or a quick visit to
someone in the lab might get you what you want much more quickly and
efficiently than organizing a meeting. When mismanaged or poorly run, meetings
can be counterproductive, distracting, and a waste of time and money.
2: Create an agenda.
Once you clearly understand the reasons for your meeting
and your intended outcomes, create an agenda. Clear agendas drive successful
meetings. The agenda not only tells people what to expect, it outlines topics
of discussion, sets the context and scope, lists key issues, and states desired
objectives.
When sent out before the meeting, an agenda permits you
and others to prepare. Avoid wasting valuable meeting time--distribute
information beforehand. If appropriate, ask for input and have your most
current agenda visible during the meeting. It helps keep the meeting focused
and references the most current information.
3: Identify and invite key participants.
Identify key people you need in the meeting. Include
anyone you believe will help you get the information and results you need-;no
more and no less. This list is easier to compose once you have an agenda
completed. Avoid excluding knowledgeable people based on politics. Include any
people, groups, or departments that you're certain will be affected by your
meeting. Have a plan for distributing your results to those who were
present--and also to anyone invited but unable to attend.
4: Present the issues and stay focused on the goal.
Begin and end your meeting on time. Make sure you have
any tools, data, and reports you need readily available before your meeting starts
and put it in the meeting space in advance. Don't waste meeting time hooking up
equipment, checking connections, or looking for files on your laptop if these
tasks can be completed earlier.
People will appreciate your efforts to conduct an
efficient meeting that ends on time or earlier than scheduled. Once you start,
set a good example by speaking clearly, respectfully, and constructively.
Encourage all meeting participants to contribute to the meeting--if someone
isn't actively participating, the meeting is probably a waste of time for them.
Move your meeting along by sticking to your agenda. If discussion goes off
topic, or becomes personal and unconstructive, refocus.
Identify topics for escalation and possible off-line
discussions for a later time. Animated or heated discussion during meetings can
be constructive and quite productive as long as it does not become personal and
off-topic.
5: Wrap-up the meeting.
Once the agenda has been covered, or your allotted time
is up, wrap up the meeting. Avoid the urge to continue by addressing any new
issues that may come up. The wrap-up officially closes the meeting. It
confirms, clarifies, and recaps what was discussed--and everyone's
understanding of the situation or goals.
Confirm whether or not your meeting has fulfilled your
objectives. If it turns out that your meeting has left you with additional
questions, identify any new topics, suggest further action, escalate your
concerns, or reschedule follow-up meetings as needed. After the meeting, distribute
notes and minutes to those on your distribution lists in a timely fashion. As a
final thought, solicit feedback from others.
What
are the types of meeting ?
·
Status Update Meetings
·
Information Sharing Meetings
·
Decision Making Meetings
·
Problem Solving Meetings
·
Innovation Meetings
·
Team Building Meetings
Here
is a break-down of the six general types of meetings with examples of
the main activities involve in each type. Knowing what type of
meeting you are planning will increase the success of your meeting.
Status update meetings
is one of the most common meeting types. This category includes regular
team and project meetings, where the primary goal is to align the team via
updates on progress, challenges, and next steps. Commonly found group
activities in these kinds of meetings are problem solving, decision making, prioritization, and task assignment.
Presentations, panel debates, keynotes, and lectures
are all examples of information sharing meetings. The primary goal of these
meeting is for the speakers to share information with the attendees. This
could be information about things like upcoming changes, new products
and techniques, or in depth knowledge of a domain. Visual communication
tools, like slides and videos, are powerful tools for
making the shared information more memorable.
At information sharing meetings the
attendees have historically been passive listeners. With new technologies like
MeetingSift they can use their smart devices to go from passive spectators
to active participants, making the meeting more engaging and enjoyable for
all.
The vast
majority of business decisions are made by groups in meetings. While small
decisions are made in all kinds of meetings, the more important decisions often
get their own dedicated meetings. There are different types of group decision making processes, and care should be taken to choose a
process that best matches the situation. A decision making process can include
group processes like information gathering and sharing, brainstorming solutions, evaluating options, ranking preferences, and
voting.
Problem
solving meetings are perhaps the most complex and varied type of meetings.
Whether the meeting is addressing an identified problem, or it is focusing on
creating strategies and plans to navigate the future, there are a rich arsenal
of group processes that can be used. Scopes and priorities need to be defined,
opportunities and threats need to be identified, and possible solutions
should be brainstormed, evaluated, and agreed upon.
Innovation meetings
and creative meetings often start with thinking outside the box, by brainstorming, associating, and sharing ideas in a
broad scope. Meeting participants can then use various techniques and processes
to reduce the diverse pool of ideas to a more focused short list. Through
ranking, evaluations, and decision making the most
suitable idea, or ideas, are identified, and recommendations and tasks can be
assigned based on this.
All
meetings should contribute to team building, strengthening relationships and
corporate culture. However, now and then team building activities should be the main focus for a
meeting. This category include meetings like include all-hands meetings,
kick-off meetings, team building outings, and corporate events. Have
participants feel like essential parts of their unit, team, department,
branch, and company has all kinds of positive impact on their engagement,
performance, and satisfaction.
What are the
characteristics of a successful business meeting ?
Characteristics of a Successful Meeting
In a study conducted by InfoCom, the longer a meeting’s
length, surprisingly, the more likely it is deemed to be effective, based on
the responses of all those who attend meetings. For meetings one half-hour or
less, 58% of respondents indicated they felt they were extremely or very
productive. The number jumped to 61% for meetings a half-hour to one hour, 67%
for meetings one hour to five hours, and an astounding 80% for 5 hours or
more.
Perhaps for meetings of five hours or more, the
preparation involved and the mere fact that the group has been sequestered for
more than a half business day, helps to increase everyone’s focus.
Begin as Scheduled
Regardless of your meeting’s length, it is necessary for
you, as the meeting manager, to steadfastly start meetings on time so that
stragglers will realize that they are late and that the others, indeed, arrived
as scheduled. This rewards those who have been prompt rather than making them
wait around for those who have not been. Organized managers start meetings on
time!
Robert Levasseur, in his book Breakthrough Business
Meetings, suggests that at the start of any meeting, “participants reach a
common understanding of what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do
it.” Hence, everyone needs to be present at the start. Levasseur says that this
normally takes ten percent of the meeting time, so if you’re going to be
meeting for 30 minutes, you only need 3 minutes or so to deal with some basic
issues such as:
the main purpose of the meeting,
the participants’ desired outcomes,
the actual agenda itself, and
the key meeting roles, which for smaller groups is
understood at the outset.
Tardy Slips
Even after you illustrate how necessary it is to be
on-time at your meetings, some individuals may still arrive late. There are
several techniques, which work to varying degrees of effectiveness, to
encourage promptness:
* require tardy people to apologize to the group. It then
becomes their responsibility afterwards to catch up with the group for the
parts they missed. Never backtrack for late arrivals, it will only force
everyone to stop and wait while the guilty party receives a personalized
briefing. * Hand out plum assignments in the first few minutes so that tardy
people are left with the least desirable tasks. This is a great incentive for
arriving early.
In certain organizations, and this is not my preference,
the tardy are the subject of early discussion. In other words, they are the
target of gossip, innuendo, and outright jokes. So be late, and be
vilified!
Find out what works for your participants, and what steps
you are willing to take to encourage promptness. You may quickly catch on that
none of these subtle coercions is as effective as pre-interviewing
participants, circulating an agenda, and demonstrating on a repeated basis that
the meetings start promptly as scheduled.
Agendas as Game Plans
The winning formula for keeping meetings on track
involves a strong agenda, organized in the best possible sequence, with
estimated time frames for each agenda item. Most participants do their best to
honor time frames if they know in advance that a particular item will be
allotted five or ten minutes.
Follow the agenda strictly, eliciting the input of others
as needed. Encourage the attendees to participate and as each agenda item is discussed,
ask participants to keep in mind the following questions: what is the specific
issue being discussed, what does the group want to accomplish in discussing the
item, and what action needs to be taken to handle the issue?
Schedule meetings around breakfast rather than lunch or
dinner. Most people have to get on with their day and hence would be glad to
get down to business. Also, some of the topics that emerge in the meeting can
be carried out during the course of the day.
Define, Resolve and Keep it Moving
When your group identifies the needed action for a
particular issue, key questions include who will act, what resources does he or
she require, when will the issue be resolved, and when will the group discuss
the results? Upon successful conclusion of these questions, the group then
moves on to the next issue, then the next. You will find yourself progressing
in a group effort to get things done.
Every question does not always need to be addressed for
every issue. Sometimes an agenda item merely represents an announcement or a
report to the group that doesn’t require any feedback or discussion. Other
times the issue at hand represents an executive briefing, because the matter
has already been resolved.
On occasion, unnecessary discussion ensues, and an item
ends up requiring twice as much time (if you’re lucky) as originally allotted.
Often you will find that participants make up for the overflow in one area by
being briefer in other areas.
For those items on the agenda that have a corresponding
objective, you have the responsibility to seek out progress towards the
objective. What else needs to be accomplished, and by when, to meet the overall
objective? As with any goal or objective they need to be written down,
quantified, and assigned specific time frames.
Undershoot so you Can Overshoot
As a meeting planner, you know how prudent it is to
undershoot the time frames within a meeting. A wise meeting manager may
allocate five minutes for a topic that he or she will personally be covering,
knowing that it will actually require about three minutes. Hence, several
minutes can be saved. Then, if somebody goes over the allotted time frame, then
overall the meeting still stays on track and ends on time. What a world.
For a meeting that lasts longer than 30 minutes, schedule
a break some time in the middle. Otherwise you’ll lose the attention of
participants who are thinking about other extraneous topics. You may also lose
the attention of some participants simply whose attention spans have been,
shall we say, influenced heavily by mass media today.
Condition Your Meeting’s Environment
The quickest way to lose the participants, other than
being an interminable, crashing bore, is to conduct your meeting in a room
where the environment can be distracting. This could involve the temperature
being too high for participants, or poor ventilation. That, coupled with a dark
meeting room, encourages people to fall asleep. Snooze city. It’s an
anthropological phenomenon — as soon as it’s dark, the brain gets the message
that it’s okay to doze off. A warm, stuffy room only aids the process.
Make sure your meeting room is well lit and has excellent
ventilation. If you have a choice between having a room be slightly too warm or
slightly too cool, opt for cool. A cool room will keep participants fresh and
alert. The discomfort may prompt attendees to complain, but at least no one
will go to sleep.
Regardless of where you’re meeting, here are other room
organizing techniques:
Meet in a room where participants won’t be disturbed by
ringing phones, people knocking on the door, and other intrusions. You want to
achieve a meeting of the minds and accomplish great things; distractions do not
help.
Meet where there is wall-to-wall carpeting and walls
adorned with pictures, posters, curtains, and the like to help absorb sounds
and offer a richer texture to the voices being heard.
Contrast this environment with a meeting held on a tile
floor, with cold metal chairs, and blank, thin walls. Participants can’t wait
for the meeting to be over when the meeting room feels like a holding cell, no
matter what’s being discussed.
Meet where the seats are comfortable and support the
lumbar region of the back. However, overly comfortable seats may have a
detrimental effect and encourage people to nod off.
