Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want to dedicate a lot of time to meetings. People hate meetings. And, as I said Monday, their experience is that they find meetings wasteful and unproductive. The key is to try not to waste their time, especially these days.

That is why preparation and pre-work are so important. If you prepare well, carefully design agendas, eliminate all distractions, and follow up on to-do items and meeting outputs, you will maximize their time. And, your team will be more willing to help you tackle the challenging items required for the organization to succeed if they collectively recognize that you’re committed to the task and respect their thinking and time.

Show your teammates that you need their help, and you understand that their time is valuable. Craft agendas for every meeting. Cyrus Farivar of BNET.com says writing an agenda helps everyone understand the objectives of the meeting. He suggests including, “everything your group will need to discuss or decide on but keep it brief, using bullet-pointed items instead of full paragraphs. Be clear about who will lead each agenda item and whether it’s an update, a discussion, or an action item that requires group decision-making.”

EffectiveMeetings.com, suggests the following steps for “creating an effective agenda”:

1. Announce the meeting to invitees via e-mail. Tell them the time, date and place, and share your goals with them.
2. Ask your invitees if they have anything they want to present or talk about at the meeting. Request that they contact you with their agenda items at least two days in advance of the meeting. Make sure that the agenda items are related to your goals. If they aren’t, suggest to the presenters that they discuss them at another meeting.
3. Realistically assign time to each agenda item and don’t cramp too many items into one meeting. If you tell your participants that your meeting is going to last one hour, stick to one hour. “It’s better to schedule 50 minutes of discussion into an hour time slot. This way you have 10 minutes to spare and if you get done a little early, people will be pleased.”
4. Try to e-mail the agenda to session participants 24 to 48 hours in advance of the meeting so they can prepare if needed. Farivar suggests doing this as well so that “potential naysayers will have the opportunity to make their objections known privately – rather than during the meeting.”
5. During the meeting, follow the agenda … especially the start and end times.

If a meeting runs overtime because new and critical issues come up, schedule a separate meeting to discuss.

In my experience, people who haven’t been in Fleishman-Hillard Innovation sessions groan when they learn how much time they’ll be devoting to one challenge. But after the sessions, 95 percent of them wish they’d had more time to work through that challenge. That’s because our innovation facilitators don’t waste their time. They plan sessions and design agendas so that time is used in meaningful ways.

Once participants see the impact of planning and pre-work, and how efficiently you used their time, they’ll be more eager to invest more time in the success of the organization … during and after the meeting, when completing tasks that came out of the meeting.

Finally, as the meeting organizer, you need to do post-work. After your meeting, thank your team for taking the time to join you. Follow up on outcomes and celebrate the successes that come out of your meetings.

– Kathie

How do you maximize the efficiency of your meetings?

March 12th, 2009 | 1 Comment
Tags: Innovation Management · meetings · time management · tips