I read a great blog with several helpful suggestions for managing
meetings the other day.  It’s entitled 9 Tips for Efficient Meetings. 
For me, the omission in this article raised a very important
question – which is “What’s Most Important in Meetings?”

Stay with me and I’ll summarize what the article said, what it
omitted, and why the answer to that question about what’s
important in meetings is critical.

First here’s a summary of the blog’s suggestions:
1. Make people show up on time
2. Always have an agenda
3. Invite the right people
4. Use email effectively
5. Use meetings to argue
6. Record your decisions
7. Kill the Powerpoints
8. Get everyone talking
9. End on time

The biggest omission in this blog is in point #6, which was basically
a suggestion to make sure you capture meeting notes to ”give you a way
to pass on the meeting’s contents to people who need to know about the
discussion, but can’t come…”

When I read this, I’m yelling “No, No, No, the biggest reason to
capture meeting minutes is not to inform,  it’s to support action!”
And by-the-way, meeting minutes do a horrible job of supporting
action and follow-through.  For most, meeting notes are something
that gets filed away and 99% of the people never read them.

But back to when I quit yelling inside.

I realized that fundamentally people approach meetings with something
that is designated as most important.  I’m sure you do as well.  It could
be a number of things, but for this article and for most meetings, it’s
all about the discussion.  The discussion is most important, and
consequently you read in this blog and others, a number of tips about
how to have an efficient discussion.

That got me thinking.  I don’t think or operate that way.  For me,
what’s most important in meetings is action, not the discussion.

I’m not terribly interested in all the talk, except that it helps to review
what’s been done to-date, what are the decision points at hand and
what action needs to take place.  Ultimately the past, present and
future action steps are what’s important… not the talking.

I use ManagePro to manage meetings, because I want to track, plan,
review and assign action items within the meeting in real time.  Meeting
minutes become a quick synopsis of the discussion content, what got
accomplished, and mostly a series of new tasks that once entered in the
meeting are already showing up on individual’s calendars and todo lists.

Again, I need the documentation primarily to help me drive action,
not capture who said what.

Bottom Line:

We all prioritize something in meetings.  If you check, I believe you’ll
find that most people prioritize the discussion as what’s most important
in the meeting process.  I think that’s worth reconsidering.  You’ll get
much more out of meetings if you prioritize supporting action, instead
of “mike” time.

Link: – ManagePro (Meeting) Management Software

I’ll cut to the chase in the first paragraph on this blog.
Unbridled business meetings are inherently unsatisfying.

 

 Meeting Satisfaction: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Put another way, meetings are like football, you need sidelines, an
end zone, and players who stop playing when either is crossed,
otherwise it just becomes a game of “keep-away” or catch. Keep reading and
let’s talk about how to change that… to make meetings more satisfying.

All meetings need direction (to an outcome), whether that is managed by
the meeting leader or moderator, or internally by the group.  But meetings
also need a way to course correct when the topic or process is no longer
relevant to the group’s intended outcome or best environment.

Think of how the following activities take away from your satisfaction with
a meeting:

1. Someone talks too long, talks in circles, monopolizes the floor…
2. The focus of the conversation drifts off topic…
3. The conversation moves from collaborative to posturing (ex. proving
a point, proving how knowledgeable one is, making my voice heard as well -
even if it has already been said or covered…)

These behaviors typically make most of us groan and look at our watch,
but they are also relatively common.  Why?

My take, is that it’s common because most meetings don’t have someone
who does an effective job at active moderation.  You know, the necessary
interrupt and redirection process that is required to do timely course
corrections and keep a meeting process in the effective sweet zone.

Do you agree?

If those behaviors are fairly common, why the lack of meeting moderation?
Is it a constitutional right to talk in meetings?  Are we discomforted by
interrupting “out of bound” behavior?  Are we afraid of making others
upset?  Maybe someone will attempt to moderate, and the person
who has the mike will just continue – like the format of the news talk
shows where people talk/shout over each other – charming.

What jumps out at me, is that many people are not very good at
self moderating when it comes to effective meeting behavior.
They struggle to contribute in short sound bytes, such that the
interaction pulls relevant information from multiple sources
and stays collaborative in nature.  This gets compounded
by the leader or the group in effect seeming to struggle with
enforcing effective meeting moderation as well.

Perhaps the answer to meeting moderation is a simple
device that anyone in the meeting can use (and that
everyone agrees to abide by) to call “time out” on
any person’s discussion.   Some groups use a bell or
something else audible.  I’m curious, what works for you?

Bottom Line:

Every effective business meeting needs someone or all the participants
to actively participate in enforcing boundaries so that the process and
content of a discussion stays aligned with the outcome.   Meeting
satisfaction seems to be directly tied to staying within the outcome bounds.�
Participants who have the meeting skills to communiate in short (twitter like)
sound bytes, help to keep the meeting  process satisfyingly outcome aligned,
and interactive.

Links:
Satisfaction with Meetings – (2of3) – Attaining Outcomes is Personal
Satisfaction with Meetings – (1of3) – Reduce the Length
Meetings as a Form of Collaboration

I attended a long distance meeting yesterday that serves as a starting point
for how not to create a satisfying meeting experience.  We started with
introductions, but no stated agenda or defined outcome.  We then proceeded
to a discussion of the need for deliverables that had already been created…
and top it all off, the leader conducted the meeting in a slow deliberate pace
that had no apparent sensitivity to the outside demands bearing down
on each of the participants.

I bet that sounds like some of the meetings you attend.  Not very satisfying
are they?  In fact I find myself getting frustrated and looking for a way to
escape, take-over or multi-task on the side.  I’m not very good at just being
patient.  I would bet that each one of us tends to use one or more of those
four options to get through meetings on a daily basis.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Meetings don’t have to be as frustrating
as they so often are.  They don’t have to be so seemingly disconnected from
the demands and stacks of deliverables just outside the door.

So here’s a 2nd action item you can invoke to immediately improve meeting
satisfaction. 

Focus on the outcome.  Let me say it again, focus on the outcome.
Don’t start without stating the intended outcome.  Don’t adopt a pace or
extend a conversation that isn’t aligned with the intended outcome and
the time left to achieve it.  Focus on the outcome to guide you through
the entire meeting process.

But there’s one more key to consider when focusing on outcomes.  The key
is that ultimately outcomes are personal.  Meeting satisfaction is directly
influenced by whether or not members feel their outcomes are achieved.

Briggs, et al documented an important bit of research in this area:
“Results support the propositions that satisfaction with meeting process and
satisfaction with meeting outcome are both a function of an individual’s
perceived net goal attainment with respect to the meeting.”

In effect, we all come to meetings with some form of an agenda, or develop
one pretty quickly once we are there.  Satisfaction with a meeting is directly
influenced by whether or not it’s getting to your outcomes and agenda.

Back to the suggestion for improving meeting satisfaction, because now
it looks better defined as “focus on the outcome for each person in
attendance” - perhaps best phrased in the question to each, “What do
you need to get out of this meeting?”

Bottom Line:

Meetings are inherently more satisfying when they are organized around
meeting the objectives of the participants.  A focus on outcome is the
powerful measuring critera by which meeting purpose, pace, amount of time
spent on discussion, and a host of other decisions can be made.  A focus
on achieving outcomes in meetings is the starting point, middle checkpoint,
and the close you want to use to help improve satisfaction with meetings.

Links:
Satisfaction with Meetings – (1of3) Reduce the Meeting Length

Meetings are a funny part of most business cultures.  Part necessity, part
plague.  They are commonly decried as immense time consumers without
equivalent value… yet we continue to hold them and attend them, almost
like the need for meetings is part of our tribal DNA.  In fact meetings are
the most common way people at work get together.

Given that it seems meetings are here to stay, I’d like to cover in this and
the subsequent two blogs, 3 things you can do to improve satisfaction for
meeting participants.  As long as you are going to have them, might as
well create a satisfying experience.  Right?

Ready?  Here’s the first thing to do to improve participant’s satisfaction.

Whatever time you’re spending in meetings today, cut it.  Start by
reducing meeting time by at least 50%.  You can structure this in a variety
of ways, here’s a couple of examples:

1. No meetings after a certain time in the morning.  E.g. you have to get
     through all your meetings before 11am.
2. Structure meetings as a stand-up versus sit-down environment.
3. Cut the time allotment for each regular scheduled meeting in half.
4. Invoke a highly visible timer for conversation and use a meeting monitor
     to “pull the mike” on people who over-extend without the group’s permission.

But, there’s actually an even better way to reduce meeting time and make
the organization more effective at the same time.

If you think about it, a large percentage of time spent in meetings is spent
on what I call verbal documenting.  My observation is that more than 50%
of the time is spent on verbal documenting. 

What do I mean by that?   By verbal documenting, I mean things like verbal
status reports, verbal discussion, verbal summaries, verbal representations
of pro’s and con’s.  I use the word verbal, because most of what transpires
isn’t written down. 

So here’s where it gets really interesting.  Verbal documentation is extremely
inefficient.  Not only is it slow (takes a lot longer to hear people verbally walk
through a thought process, then read a dictation of what they said – probably
a minimum of 5 times as long), but the follow-up is bad because we all forgot
most of what we hear within 72 hours.  Verbal documentation in meetings is
a poorly recorded, but routinely used management on the fly of (often) critical
information.

By-the-way, the typical meeting documentation, if not verbal, is a powerpoint
deck, which doesn’t do a lot for information efficiency or performance
improvement either,  but that’s another blog.  Back to the topic.

So here’s what to do if you want to improve satisfaction with meetings,
reduce the time you spend in meetings and turn a corner on your productivity.

Reward written not verbal documentation.  Tie reduction of time spent in
meetings into a result of completing written documentation.  Documenting
progress updates, status summaries, next steps in a business management
program like ManagePro, not only sharply reduces the amount of time needed
for meeting review, it actually helps you get more value out of the information
that’s written – because it is clearly actionable and can be easily followed up on.

If team members write out the documentation, reward them by allowing them
to attend in shorter durations or skip the meeting all together.  I mean if you
need them to explain or discuss, you can always call them in when that issue is
on the table.  One CTO issued the following memo:  Any developer or QA engineer
who submits a progress report online is exempted from attending the weekly
status meeting. The result was overwhelming.

Bottom Line:

One of the biggest things you can do to improve satisfaction with meetings
in most organizations is to reduce the amount of time spent in them.  But
don’t just cut meeting time, make that result contingent upon or a reward
for documenting in information management or group support systems.
Software that will allow you to leverage information more effectively…
much more effectively then leveraging recall on past conversations.

Meetings.  What a time sink, and yet the need for collaboration requires having meetings.  I participated in a meeting that was scheduled for 30 minutes.  It in fact continued for 90 minutes, and had to be rescheduled for a second session because we still didn’t get to our deliverables.

Right.  And you probably have to sit through a lot more of those than I do. Collaboration through meetings is no easy task to master, is it?  That’s part of the reason you need to use software like ManagePro for meeting management, but that’s another conversation.  Back to the topic.

It got me thinking (I usually start thinking about a way to reframe things or alternative options when things get frustrating) about ways to reinvent meetings to save us all a lot of time.  I’ll share 3 of them – let me know what you think.

1.  Meetings should only treat participants as blind if, in fact, they are so. E.g. Don’t read out loud what’s written – drop the microphone and let the participants read it in 1/10th the time it will take you to verbally walk through the points.  The meeting will already being moving faster.

2.  Don’t tie up the podium when you can manipulate data. If you want feedback, let people write/key it in.  Update the presentation document in real time.  Get to the data in an interactive manner. Move from thought to data, instead of going through voice as much as you can… you have to get to data input at some point, get there faster.  Try running meetings with the mute on…

3.  Start from the ending and work your way back.  I notice a number of people define the outcome for the meeting, and then engage in a pace or process that has no hope, absolutely no hope, of reaching that outcome within the alloted time. The best way I know to work backwards in a meeting is to be super honest about what you can accomplish in the time allotted and then live with those limitations.  It’s not the federal budget, you can’t spend what you don’t have without immediate repercussions.

Bottom Line:
1. Participants should read, not listen, we’re not blind.
2. Interact with the data as much as possible, not once removed by conversation.
3. Start from the end, treat time like money, and realize this is not the federal budget, you can’t print the stuff when you run out.

Links:

Meeting Management – an Untapped area in IT Management Systems

Meetings are a Matter of Precious Time

Robert Hamada (aka Reid Hastie) wrote a recent NY Times article, “Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time“. He describes the distress of non-effective meetings and their consumption of the participants unrecoverable time, and their pervasiveness (“every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones”). But his focus is to point to setting clear goals and personal responsibility as the antidote. It’s good, but not enough… and technology, specifically an information technology management system, can help, let me explain.

Actually Hamada’s article touches on where technology helps the most. He describes different participants each taking “mike” time (my phrase) to speak to their own agenda – none of which particularly helped the meeting move forward or created a outcome achieving process. It reminds me that most meetings have a loose enough structure that they frequently drift into a “karoke” effect. Who ever wants to sing… can. And in fact may in effect stay at the mike for several songs, or sing multiple verses of the same song.

I think most meetings have a poorly defined and much to wide definition of acceptable verbal behavior. Think about it for a moment. Is it OK to express yourself in 50 words or 500 or 5,000? It’s probably not defined or enforced in the meetings you attend. Here’s a few more examples.  Is it OK to tell stories to illustrate your point? Is it OK to tell stories without checking to see if anyone is confused and needs the story for explanation… or bored and needs the story for entertainment;).

Robert was correct, we don’t have clear enough objectives and shared responsibility for reaching them, but perhaps as important, we don’t have agreed upon definitions for when to get on the “mike” and how to act once you have the “mike”.

We’ve completed two studies on meeting management, in both of which we were able to demonstrate a 50% reduction in the time spent in the meeting to cover the same set of agenda and project items.

We use ManagePro as the IT Management System to provide a framework for not only setting the agenda, but also for structuring or defining meeting behavior. In essence the meeting ran with ManagePro projecting the projects and goals to be reviewed on the meeting room wall using a projector. Meeting behavior was structured, perhaps a better work is focused or contained, as the following sequence of behaviors.
1. Read the displayed latest progress update on the selected topic,
2. Discuss the status and document any additional information discussed
3. Identify any action items coming out of the discussion and create them on the spot as to-dos with a person assigned and a due date… then move on to the next item.

By-the-way, if anyone knows where you can find sand-timers that are large enough to easily see in a meeting, let me know. They would make an excellent prop for giving people a visual cue to wrap up their discussion.

Links:

Working Strategically – Outcomes, Time and Value

Being a Strategic Manager and Your Schedule