making meetings matter

Ah, meetings. They're much maligned, often for good reason. We have standing meetings, catchup meetings, board (bored?) meetings, team meetings, committee meetings, project meetings, and even annual general meetings. You might ask, "how on earth do we get anything done?".

It's easy to say that meetings are a waste of time, but they remain an important part of workplace interaction. When done well they are a powerful addition to workplace productivity. So, how can we make better meetings?

Meetings matter when people leave them with inspiration, clarity, actions, learning, and/or accountability.

It's what happens after the meeting that matters! So, before you call a meeting, decide which of these objectives you want to achieve - and be ready to communicate why that's important. To borrow the phrase from Stephen Covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, "begin with the end in mind".

None of us work in isolation. We have teams that we are a part of, and therefore we will have a need to meet from time to time. Making those meetings effective and productive is dependent on the habits we instil when we get together.

THE 15 'H'ABITS OF EFFECTIVE MEETINGS

Once you've established the meetings purpose, instil these habits to ensure your meeting is productive:

• Clarify at the start of the meeting what you need to achieve by the end of the meeting;
• Confirm that the people attending the meeting need to be there;
• Agree that the meeting agenda is relevant for the meeting purpose - and change it if necessary;
• Assign a person to capturing the actions arising in the meeting;
• If the meeting is to gain clarity, or to provide updates, then ensure that people have circulated their update to all attendees prior to the meeting;
• Ensure that people are not wasting time in the meeting reading things that they could have read to prepare for the meeting, and call out this behaviour if either somebody is unprepared or they didn't give others the chance to prepare;
• Give everyone the chance contribute - after all pulling everyone together just to tell them "stuff they need to know" will be perceived as awfully egotistical (yeah, we've all been there!);
• Ensure that your contribution is relevant to the meeting purpose;
• Ensure that discussion ends in an action to be taken;
• Ensure that every action is captured, no matter how big or small the action may be;
• Assign every action to only one person,
• Agree the importance of and due date for each action;
• Ensure that every incomplete action from prior meetings is reviewed at every meeting and that they remain relevant;
• Understand the value of the meeting by being conscious of, and acknowledging, the time and energy of your colleagues in attending the meeting;
• At the end of the meeting confirm that you have achieved what you met for in the first place, and agree if, when, and where to meet again.

​Effective meetings are all about discipline and commitment. Instilling these habits will give people clarity of their contribution, and make your meetings a powerhouse for productive action.

Using Teams and Actions in The H Factor

Anyone can create a team at any time.  We encourage people to use the system to formalise your meetings and make them more effective. In formalising your team, you also give visibility to all your colleagues of the purpose for the team and the members in it.

Once you have created the team then the team members can use the system to capture actions from the meeting, assign them to a team member, and confirm their importance and due date.  This makes it easy for you to instil the 15 habits into your team.

Only the team members can see the actions.  

All actions display in the current actions table until they are completed, where they can be sorted by action owner, due date, or importance.

​The system will stores all the completed actions of the team in the completed actions table.  There they can be easily searched and sorted so that the team history is preserved.

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