Nickel in demand

Every businessman and woman
knows the importance of meetings.
A necessary evil they may be,
meetings are vital for providing and
receiving updates, communicating, planning,
brainstorming and making decisions.
All too often, however, meetings take
up an inordinate amount of time. But
by focusing on meeting productivity,
individuals and businesses can greatly
reduce time wastage. In a business climate
where time is precious, that’s an advantage
many of us can’t afford not to take.
So how do you make sure every meeting
is effective? Follow these simple tips:
1) Always have an agenda
with defined expected
outcomes from the meeting
Good meetings are managed events,
they do not just happen. I am constantly
amazed at how many organisations allow
their most precious resource - their people
- to sit in meetings with no predefined
purpose or outcomes. It is akin to letting
a machine in a factory run idle or produce
parts to no set specification.
Always have a clear agenda and
expected outcomes to ensure the
meeting stays on track and produces
results. This relies on proper meeting
preparation, executing the meeting to
plan, and then good follow-up. A useful
tip in making sure the meeting has been
a success, is to simply ask yourself at the
end of every meeting ‘did we do what we
said we would do?’
“Good meetings are
managed events, they do
not just happen”
2) Assign clear roles
and responsibilities
One way to make sure your meeting
has an agenda, and achieves what
it is supposed to, is to assign clear
responsibilities to the meeting
attendees. Have an allocated meeting
leader to prepare material for the
meeting, who is responsible for making
decisions and designating other meeting
responsibilities, such as taking minutes,
and assigning actions as an outcome.
A facilitator or chairperson, whose role
it is to assist in the preparation, control the
meeting process and keep an eye on the
time, should support the meeting leader.
It is this person who is responsible for
ensuring the meeting stays on course and
achieves the expected outcomes.
Other meeting attendees will then
be expected to generate ideas, provide
recommendations, build on the ideas of
others and add expertise to the meeting.
3) Ask ‘So what?’
Focus on the presentation of information
rather than data. If you include too much
data, significant time is lost whilst the
meeting attendees try to determine
what the numbers mean, or even argue
over them.
Use headlines to tell a story and
get your point across, and make sure
everything passes the ‘so what?’ test,
i.e. that it is contributing to the desired
outcome of the meeting. If it’s not directly
relevant, leave it out.
4) Don’t plan
‘back-to-back’ meetings
The cost of having 9 people sitting in a
room for 10 minutes waiting for a tenth
attendee to arrive so that a meeting can
start will run into £100s.
Multiply that number by the number
of times meetings start late in most
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[ Aug 2014 ] BE Monthly