Common Sense meeting tips

organization / productivity July 13th, 2007

I work in a connected environment where people have an amazing array on information and groupware tools available to them – video, IM, teleconferencing, LiveMeeting, groupware, workflow and business processing applications, and more.

The face to face meeting can seem to be a liability, especially when mismanaged.

Some basic principles people forget when managing meetings:

HAVE AN AGENDA AND STICK TO IT!
If you don’t publish one before the meeting, spend the first 5 minutes making an agenda. Otherwise, the meeting will inevitably drift.
ON TIME.
Get in on time, start when you say you’re going to start, and wrap up at the time you say you’re going to wrap up. That’s common courtesy and common sense, both to the people in your meeting who have given you their time, and to the people who may be waiting for the conference line, room, etc.
SMEs – GET THEM IN AND GET THEM OUT.
Once you have the agenda, look at the subject matter experts (SMEs) you have in the room. Get them in, accept their contributions, and get them out and working again.
DEJA VU -HAVEN’T I’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE?
Don’t duplicate content. This can be especially hard in tiered management scenarios, where you have Executive Management, Senior Management, and management all vying for time with the analysts/engineers (AKA the guys trying to get their work done between meetings). I try to plan executive meetings early in the week, senior management following, then management/1:1 meetings near the end of the week to play catch up.
IS THIS GOOD FOR THE COMPANY?
When I did the Franklin Covey time management process on paper, one thing that I found interesting was the meeting planner page. The meeting planner page included a section for Participants, with columns for name and hourly rate. The next time you plan one of those “touch base” meetings without an agenda, figure the labor cost and the opportunity cost of the meeting. Not only is it costing the company in labor cost, but those people aren’t doing work they could be doing normally if you got your updates through less intrusive means.
REMEMBER THE FORMAT
Have you been on a conference call and had someone on the other end grab a white board? Publish documentation on the web, send remote and local participants a well-designed PowerPoint presentation to walk through.