You might have come across the term “death by meetings”. In some organisations meetings are only held when they are really needed. Sadly, particularly in larger organisations, meetings seem to be the norm. At the same time, meetings can be of real value. So what can you do to transform meetings from business liability to business asset?
Have a meeting cull
How many meetings are held in your organisation everyday, week, month or year? Do you know or make an educated guess?
Truth is in many large organisations, hundreds of meetings are being held every day, costing thousands of pounds or dollars. Chances are there is a huge amount of duplication and overlap. There are probably some that are taking a lot of time but not delivering any value.
So what’s the answer? Take time do an inventory or stock take of every meeting in the organisation and ask:
• Why is the meeting being held?
• What has it contributed to business results in the last 6 months compared to the investment?
• What would happen if we dropped it?
If you cannot come up with compelling reasons you probably don’t need the meeting.
Minimise documents
If you start producing lots of papers for meetings it takes even longer and is even costlier to run the meeting. There will be a handful of meetings that you will need to make formal with papers presented but most don’t fall into this category.
Think about it in most situations people bring things to meetings to:
• Provide an update
• Inform
• Get a decision
Instead of spending huge amounts of time getting people to produce documents, why not invest in training people in verbal presentation and asking effective questions.
Set short deadlines for actions
Insist that actions are completed within days rather than weeks of meetings. Why? Simply, because if something is really important, people will make it a priority and the action will be completed. If it does not get done it might be that it was not important in the first place.
Train people to listen and question effectively
We all, to a greater or lesser extent love the sound of our own voices. In reality, few people are really skilled listeners or skilled at asking powerful questions to get to the heart of an issue. Time spent training people to listen effectively and use good questioning can save hours in terms of meetings.
Bottom Line – Meetings run and conducted well are a vital part of organisation success. So what do you need to do in order to transform your meetings from resource stealers to business asset?
