Engage! Through Efficient Meetings

Engage! Through Efficient Meetings

Are your meetings a seemingly endless parade of status updates? Do your meetings always get side-tracked by irrelevant topics? Do you always have back-to-back 1-hour long meetings?

If you are anything like me and the majority of American’s you are always trying to do more during your eternally scarce work resource – time. Shorter attention spans, more multi-tasking, more interactions, more global teams, more team rooms, more projects, more high priorities, more strategies, more decisions, more initiatives and at the base of all of this – more meetings.

To create more efficient use of time and communication for every aspect of what you are doing “more” of is the thoroughly efficient meeting. Create shorter, more engaging meetings, loyal employees or co-workers, and enthusiastic attendants. This isn’t aimed to transform every meeting into a motivational speech, but simply establishing a better use of resources during what is considered to be one of the most highly unproductive times of the day – meetings.

To create the foundation for an efficient meeting you must create the right atmosphere and dispel the typical meeting structure. Meetings are not supposed to be hour-long (or more) session of:

• Review what was decided last meeting
• Review actions and progress that have happened since the last meeting
• Outline the decisions that need to be made
• Review the information promoting a specific decision
• Review alternative decisions and alternative data
• Discuss side-tangents and pet projects that are on people’s mind
• (If lucky) get a decision to move forward to forward the project

The goal is to create event or task driven meetings with a team/individual contributor balance which is concentrated on solutions in the most effective manner. This is done by engaging all attendees before, during and after the meeting.

Engage Before the Meeting:

Meetings should not be a time to review all of the emails and changes to a project that have been since the last meeting. Meetings should be a time for action. At the same time to create action all parties must be on the same page, with updated information to enroll support and enthusiasm. Question for Pre-Meeting Engagement: how do you establish a baseline of knowledge for the meeting to ensure engagement and a decision?

Give a complete, brief summary for the meeting ahead of time. No one wants to review all share point sites, emails, past records, interactions, IM conversations and conference call notes to get that back up to date on a project – no one has time. In order to start engagement and remove all progress reports, right before the meeting email an update or meeting reminder to highlight the key discussion points, actions, updates and goals for the meeting. Depending on what you see as most effective and how often the meeting is held, this may be 10 minutes before the meeting, or even the day before the meeting. This message summary must be very direct, very brief and use concise language structure, to ensure all meeting attendees can review and understand the facts in 1-3 minutes. The purpose of this brief summary is to begin the transition of the attendee to the meeting subject and initiate engagement, freeing up the attendees mind from recent conversations, meetings, issues and the like.

Engage During the Meeting:

Though most of the corporate world revolves around PowerPoint presentations and conference calls with a variety of during sharing capabilities, engagement is still a priority. This means reviewing your basics from Speech 101. Depending on the meeting action, you must structure your meeting along the same lines as you would a speech. Based on the general nature of business meetings, near all are persuasive (other options: informative, instructional, entertain) – trying to convince an audience to take action or make a decision. To create an effective, persuasive meeting you need to create one thing during the meeting – engagement to drive a decision.

Creating meeting-driven engagement can be done through a variety of means and subjects, including: outcome driven actions, career relevance, discuss interesting people/situation/information, being authentic and unscripted, driving towards a large strategic goal, creating actionable and specific outcomes, interesting and brief subject titles to catch attention, or having a single, defined expectation. Each of these items creates a deeper engagement through connecting the curious-personal and productive-professional self. Your meeting should be seen as a starting point, not an ending. At the same time, keep the team on track, by limiting all side conversations and tangents not directed toward the meeting subject. Additionally, your meeting should be as interactive as possible by sharing your screen (visual engagement), sharing your file or project (demonstration engagement), sharing in a unique location/non-conference room (environmental engagement) and ensure all attendees share candidly, openly (expressive/personal engagement). In creating this engagement during the meeting, it creates better discussions, faster actions and more loyal teams.

Engage After the Meeting:

Engaging the attendees after the meeting is crucial to drive productivity and engagement. In a follow-up email, summarize the topics discussed, data presented, decision(s) made, next steps and follow-up actions with specific names and tasks. Creating a lead for each action ensures that there is a champion for each task to ensure responsibility and action. Finally, in this follow-up email, it is important to elicit any additional feedback from the meeting attendees. This not only gives them a chance to add any information that was overlooked during the meeting, but to continue the discussion and engagement beyond the meeting time.

At the end of the day, effective meetings engage in the future, rather than summarizing the past. Do you have any other strategies to ensure a successful meeting?

-thePonderingNick