When you hold meetings, are attendees engaged and participating? More, importantly, do you recognize any of these symptoms?
Meetings: the bane of the modern workplace. Try to think of the
last project in which you were involved that did not require a meeting or a
regular set of meetings. Unless you completed the project completely on your
own, you probably can’t think of one. Meetings are what most employees love to
hate. This is because meetings have the potential to be collaborative,
efficient, productive, and empowering, but most cannot be described with these
qualities. According to a survey known as Microsoft Office Personal
Productivity Challenge (PPC), on average people spend 5.5 hours a week in
meetings and 71% feel that meetings are typically unproductive. This means we
need to have better meetings. If every time you call a meeting, you have a general sense of impending doom or you recognize the signs above, you need to rethink the way you are conducting meetings.
Better meetings happen with better planning. Most meetings
follow a predictive cycle of planning the meeting, conducting the meeting, and
following-up after the meeting.
Tips for More Productive Meetings
When you schedule a meeting, there are areas of improvement along each step
of the meeting cycle. A productive meeting requires:
- Clear goals - Goals should be defined in your planning stage
- Clear and concise agenda - Agendas should be followed and prolonged discussions should be limited or tabled
- Advance notice - Attendees should be given enough time to prepare for the meeting
- Time management - Stick to the starting and ending time of the meeting (and keep it no longer that it needs to be!)
- Follow-up - In order to ensure action items are completed, there should be follow-up to every meeting to remind those who attended of the decisions that were made
But, the number one tip that I can’t stress enough? Stay away from automatic meetings! By this, I mean don’t have a meeting just to have one. This is why
planning and defining goals is an important step in the meeting cycle. With
clear goals, you will easily be able to define a list of goals, an agenda, and
list of who should attend the meeting.
Visual Meetings Lead to Productive Meetings
Visuals can help you in each step of the meeting cycle, save you time,
and increase the effectiveness of communication between the person conducting
the meeting and those who participate in the meeting. Mind maps are a great way
to brainstorm and plan a project. Timelines effectively outline key dates and
goals. Matrices can help in sales and marketing when understanding pros and
cons or weaknesses in strategy. Instead of talking about a project or set of ideas in abstract terms, you can
document it using your visual of choice. There are numerous visuals that can
help you, but when I think meeting – I think mind map.
Mind maps are a great tool for meeting agendas, especially for project meetings. By
using a mind map, for a project meeting or set of meetings you can effectively
outline the goals, project parts, action items, and team members. This way, it
will be easier to communicate and collaborate on the actions and priorities and
you can eliminate unnecessarily meetings and wasted time. Plus, mind maps are
far more effective and concise than the typical bulleted agenda list. Compare
the bulleted list with the mind map below:
- Use A Mind Map
- Brainstorm all topics that need to be covered
- Ensures nothing is left out
- Becomes your "Visual Agenda"
- Keeps attendees focused
- Everyone can see how topics relate
Not
only is it easier to understand the items and how they are related in a mind
map rather than the bulleted list, it is also just as easy, if not easier, to
edit the mind map during the meeting as you discuss and refine the topics.
In the next couple posts I will outline how to plan a visual meeting,
how to conduct a visual meeting, and why following up after a meeting is so important.
If you are not convinced your meetings are unproductive, try this: for a week,
record how many meetings you attend, length of meetings, number of action items
for each meeting, and how successfully action items were completed. With this
information, you will be able to start to see how you can cut down on meeting
times and how you can improve on having action-driven meetings.
