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Make Your Meetings Worthwhile
How many meetings have you attended recently? And how many actually achieved their purpose? Do your meetings not get anywhere? Do people not pay attention - stare into their coffee cups or doodle? I watched someone responding to email on her laptop the entire time at one recent meeting. But perhaps one reason for that was the meeting which was ‘ho hum’ and directionless. Even wasteful. Here are 9 tips for productive, useful meetings. It assumes formal meetings rather than the quick 'toolbox' meeting or 'what's on today?' type of thing. 1. Make sure you really need a meeting. Don't use them purely for routine announcements or as a substitute for action. You won’t achieve anything if people are just there to listen. It's often better to move routine ‘just so everyone knows this’ stuff, status reports, etc. elsewhere. For example, email before the meeting, post on noticeboard/intranet, etc. Keep meetings for issues that really do require discussion, and for delicate or complex announcements or negotations. 2. For every meeting, have a definite (preferably written) agenda. And don’t have meetings without one. For example, if you think the ISO Standard says you must have a ‘management review meeting’ then you are probably on the wrong track. An ‘agenda’ is just the content planned for the meeting: a list of the topics intended to be covered, in the order you expect to deal with them. A solid, agreed-upon agenda gives people time to prepare, and is another means of keeping the meeting on track. 3. Allocate time for each agenda item. If you don't, how will you know if you're running late? That doesn't mean you have to be rigid about it, but it will push you to think about how things take, and try to allow adequate time. Don't fall into the trap of not managing the time, and then running out of time for important topics. Or the other trap of extending the time so meetings become marathon sessions. 4. Have a Chair and Note-taker: someone to record minutes/actions. At the meeting, make sure these roles are allocated and agreed. The Chair is the person facilitating the meeting, the Note/action-taker records the decisions and actions agreed. Don't try and combine the 2 roles with one person, it almost never works. 5. Before you begin the meeting itself, make the meeting purpose clear. Review & agree on the agenda. This helps achieve shared understanding about what the meeting expects to achieve. 6. Stay with the agreed agenda. The Chair’s job is to keep the meeting moving forward, and on track. That may include agreeing to ‘park’ an issue or refer it to someone else. 7. Make sure the key decisions & actions are written down: who will do what, and by when. If the Note-taker hasn’t captured any action or decision coming out of a discussion when everyone wants to move on, it's almost a dead certainty that people aren’t clear about what was decided. Or won’t be later. I can’t over-emphasise how important this is. It’s so important, I’ve included an easy template for meeting actions in my ISO 9001 DIY Pack. The Note-taker should, if necessary, speak up to ask what decision to record. 8. Beware taking silence to mean agreement. Some people are slower or less inclined to speak up. The Chair should keep an eye out for this, be explicit, and where necessary, encourage them to speak up, by asking for specific input from people who have not spoken: ‘Is there agreement on this point? Fred, are you OK with it? John? Sue?’ etc. Much better to have disagreement in the meeting when discussing a thorny topic, than silence... and then have resistance emerge later. 9. Circulate the actions list (minutes) as soon as possible after the meeting, within 3 days at most, so everyone is clear about what was agreed, and what is to happen. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can get ISO 9001 yourself, without struggle, at an affordable cost.
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Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep. ~ Albert Camus
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