Hands up if you love meetings. Anyone? I thought not...
I’d guess that you’ve attended a meeting of some sort recently, though; probably at work, though you might also have meetings as part of a hobby or community activity you’re involved in.
The stereotypical meeting is long, boring, and full of waffle: but it doesn’t need to be that way.
Here’s how to get more from meetings:
Do You Need the Meeting?
In a lot of cases, items can be dealt with via phone calls and emails. Perhaps you’ve experienced this if you’ve ever had a meeting cancelled – decisions still get made, and actions are taken.
If the meeting is necessary, do you need to be at it? If you’re only attending because your manager has told you to, don’t be afraid to question whether your time might be better spent elsewhere. After all, every hour you spend twiddling your thumbs in an irrelevant meeting is an hour when you can’t be getting on with the rest of your work.
Have an Agenda
Assuming that the meeting is going ahead, make sure there’s an agenda – and get it circulated in advance. This gives participants a chance to think about what they really want to say: reducing the amount of waffle and thinking-out-loud at the meeting itself.
Most agendas will include room for Any Other Business: if possible, encourage attendees to table items in advance of the meeting.
Prepare for the Meeting
Read the minutes of the previous meeting (especially if you didn’t attend it), and read through the agenda in advance. This lets you think of any questions you want to bring to the meeting: perhaps you’re the facilitator, and you need to ask for everyone’s opinion on a particular issue, or maybe there’s something you’re unclear about and that you can’t find out on your own.
Focus on Face-to-Face Advantages
The whole point of a meeting is to discuss and decide things when you can talk face-to-face for an uninterrupted period of time. Make sure you get the most from the meeting by focusing the agenda and the discussion on items that require a face-to-face demonstration or a back-and-forth debate. Try to leave minor, fiddly points for post-meeting emails.
One tip here is to circulate documents and information well in advance: you don’t want to waste meeting time by going over things that the participants could easily have read up on beforehand.
Listen Closely
Since you’re at the meeting, you should be trying to get as much value from it as possible. This means listening carefully – even if you feel that you can’t contribute to or learn from what’s being discussed.
Encourage Everyone to Speak
If you’re the chair or facilitator of a meeting, try to encourage everyone to speak (unless it’s a very large group). Junior members or those attending for the first time will often sit silently throughout the entire meeting – but their input can be very valuable, as they’ll bring a fresh perspective.
An easy way to get people to speak up is to ask something like “Joe, what do you think about this?” Try to ask open-ended questions, rather than questions like “Does everyone agree?” – which will often just get a round of nods.
Have a Firm Cut-Off Time
Don’t let meetings drag on indefinitely – the agenda should include an end time, as well as the start time. (It can be useful to give each item on the agenda a suggested time slot, too; this can help the chair realise when the meeting is getting behind schedule.)
Experiment with cutting the usual length of your meetings a bit. You might be surprised to find that you can cover all the important items in a shorter time; people tend to focus better and make decisions faster.
Follow-Up
Sometimes, a meeting goes really well, several decisions are made, and people agree on various actions as a result. Yet, by the time the next meeting comes around, nothing much has been done.
To prevent this, make sure that whoever is taking the minutes writes down action points very clearly, with the name or initials of the person who will be taking action. This makes it easy to follow up with that person before the next meeting – and it’s also a useful reminder to meeting participants who may forget what was agreed.
Do you find meetings a complete waste of time, or a great opportunity to bring people together and have fruitful discussions? How could you get more from the meetings you’re involved in, whether at work or in your community or interest groups?
Written on 8/06/2009 by Ali Hale.Ali is a professional writer and blogger, and a part-time postgraduate student of creative writing. If you need a hand with any sort of written project, drop her a line (ali@aliventures.com) or check out her website at Aliventures.
How to Get More from Live Meetings
