Productive Meetings | Part 2
How to use meetings as a powerful tool, part 2 of 2
In Part 1, we made clear that every meeting must have an agenda.
Agenda makes meetings more productive, shorter, and helps to have fewer meetings in the future. Ultimately, the agenda saves time.
In Part 2, we will outline three fundamental interconnected rules of every meeting and mention a few useful tips aside.
Rule #1: Meeting minutes
Sure, this one seems like a no-brainer. Every participant should take notes. Nevertheless, very often people actually forget to document what is being discussed. And if people do not take notes, guess what will happen next week:
Oh, another meeting. But wait, haven’t we discussed this last week already??
Sounds familiar? Always document what is being discussed!
Without taking notes, the information, knowledge and decisions taken will almost certainly vanish and next week you and your colleagues can enjoy another meeting about the very same topic. Again.
Rule #2: Next steps
Before the meeting is over, define clear action items — what will be the next steps. There should always be at least one action item defined. This is a tangible and valuable result of a meeting.
When you have defined the next actions, don’t forget to summarize them once more to make sure everyone really understand and cope with them.
Tip: Try to have more smaller items rather than one confusing, big “whale” item, which is hard to track progress towards and will take forever to be completed.
Rule #3: Responsible person
You have defined the action items and documented them. Awesome, you are almost there. Now there is just one thing left to do — assign a person responsible for each action item.
When assigning the responsible people, be aware of this peculiar characteristic of responsibility:
Responsibility tends to magically dissolve if distributed to more then one person. The more people are responsible for one action item, the faster and more mysteriously the responsibility disappears.
Therefore, for each action item, try to have only one person responsible.
Summary & a few useful tips
To wrap it up, we know a successful meeting always starts with an agenda attached to it. Then, during the meeting itself, participants should take notes and before the meeting is over, action items should be agreed upon and responsible individuals assigned to them.
Those are simple, common-sense principles necessary to run a meaningful and productive meeting. Unfortunately, very often these principles are omitted, resulting in unsatisfactory outputs and frustration in a group.
On top of the basic principles, you may find the following tips useful in your team or organization.
Various environment
Engage the creativity of participants and decrease frustration from a “one-room jail”. Try various places to hold a meeting.
Sometimes in a big meeting room with TVs and whiteboards, sometimes in a relax zone, or by the desk at your workplace. Depending on the agenda, participants, and the nature of the meeting.
Parallelize
Instead of a whole-day meeting, where possible, split it into parallel sessions dedicated to selected areas. People can attend only the sessions where they can really contribute and not waste their time and be bored where they are not needed.
Meaningful attendance
Think twice about who you invite to the meeting. Only the people that could contribute to the agenda should participate. The smaller number of participants will let you get to the point faster. No need for rubberneckers.
Ice breakers
If not all participants know each other, consider starting the meeting with an ice breaker activity. It fights the timidity and helps people to collaborate easier, without inhibitions.
Energizers
If you are about to run a long meeting, it is an excellent practice to incorporate energizers to the agenda.
There are more useful tips on how to facilitate a meeting. This is just the tip of an iceberg. But always remember — agenda, meeting minutes, and action items assigned to responsible persons 😉.
⏪ Go back to the Productive Meetings | Part 1
✅ Download the printable Meeting Checklist
We are ACTUM Digital and this piece was written by Martin Dušek, Director of Apollo Division. Feel free to get in touch.
