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Cure The Meeting Blahs
June 01, 2006
Tips to make your meetings more efficient and productive
It could be part of an elaborate team-building strategy: Every week, you and your team spend five minutes in a quiet conference room trying to figure out why each of you is there. But there is no ulterior motive to those first few minutes; they're just the time you spent waiting for a meeting to start.
It's no secret that meetings can be a waste of time. Even before they start, you've lost time wondering where everyone is. If your staff meetings have become boring, overgrown, and ineffective, you may have to rethink your meeting strategy, both in terms of how often you meet and who is invited.
Before calling a meeting, decide if it's necessary. According to Diane Fasel, cofounder and president of The Bellwood Group, a management consulting firm based in Fresno, California, meetings are often viewed as a waste because too often they're used for announcements.
"The problem is that most meetings are just broadcasts," she says. "If all I'm going to do is tell you information, then you don't need a meeting." Instead of holding a meeting to release information, save time by using e-mails or posting to a community blog.
The key to holding an effective meeting, Fasel believes, is knowing what the meeting is about before it begins. "The agenda needs to be clear and purposeful. Without an agenda, a meeting tends to be a conversation," she says. Even with an agenda, discussions about specific topics can drag. Barbara Hemphill, author of Taming the Paper Tiger, recommends creating time limits on each subject to move the meeting along. "Time limits force people to be more succinct," she says. Take five minutes to create an outline and you'll get that time back in the meeting.
Preparation also should extend to all of the meeting's attendees. If you make an outline, send it out to your team ahead of time. Once all attendees review the topics and know if they need to be present, a meeting becomes an informed exchange of thoughts instead of an unmanageable free flow of jumbled ideas, according to Debbie Williams, author of Common Sense Organizing. "You really want to know what to expect when you go into a meeting. Communication is so much better when people know when they're going to speak," she says.
Make your sales meetings more efficient by making them smaller. If members of your team sell different products in different regions, a large general meeting is not the most valuable way to discuss specific problems and goals. "Make sure that everyone who is invited has to be there," advises Monica Ricci, author of Organize Your Office in No Time.
About three years ago, Chemtura Inc., a chemical manufacturer based in Middlebury, Connecticut, decentralized its regular meetings down to its smallest sales groups. Since Chemtura salespeople deal with different types of chemicals depending onthe region they work in, holding one large meeting didn't make sense, says Steven Kant, the director of marketing services for Chemtura. "We now can tailor our meeting content so everyone is involved with eighty percent or more of the topic," Kant says.
Kant admits one downside to meeting in smaller groups is that senior managers often end up attending more meetings. But communication within each meeting often improves due to the smaller setting. "It encourages more two-way conversation, because you have eight people instead of twenty on the conference call," he says.
Simple tricks like making your meetings smaller, planning out your goals, and attendees being on time can streamline your meetings, transforming them from a waste to an essential. —Rebecca Aronauer
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