Advance Your Career In Every Meeting
I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve called someone and the response I received is that they are in a meeting. I often wonder if they are in a meeting to see if they should have a meeting.
According to the MeetingKing website, in the United States alone we “enjoy” 11 million formal business meetings each day and we waste $37 billion in unnecessary meetings every year. The site also offered up these statistics:
- 37 percent of employee time is spent in meetings,
- managers attend more than 60 meetings per month,
- 39 percent of meeting participants admitted to dozing off during a meeting,
- over 70 percent brought other work to meetings,
- an estimated 25-50 percent of meeting time is wasted.
The researchers found that the more meetings employees attended, the more exhausted they felt and the higher they perceived their workload to be.
Meetings are a fact of life for every employee. Instead of just enduring them, learn to use meetings to your advantage. Meetings can actually be very productive if you manage them effectively. I suspect the main reason that people dread meetings is that they are not well-planned with specific goals anticipated.
With that in mind, whoever calls the meeting must first decide what needs to be accomplished. The Monday morning sales meeting? The Friday weekly wrap-up? Even if those are typically on the schedule, it’s still necessary to define the purpose of the meeting in one or two sentences. That way people know why they’re present, what needs to be done and how to know if the meeting is successful.
Here is what I do:
Set an agenda. List the issues to discuss, review or decide. Your agenda should include firm starting and ending times, as well as estimates of time for each item under discussion. Time limits encourage people to be better prepared to discuss the subject at hand. They also demonstrate a respect for attendees’ other commitments.
Start on time. Don’t wait for latecomers. If someone is late, don’t go back and review what has been covered. Show that you value the time of the people who showed up promptly. In the same vein, end the meeting as soon as you have achieved what you set out to do.
Appoint a “referee.” The referee’s job is to keep the discussion on track and interrupt whenever the talk strays. New topics that arise should either be tabled until later or scheduled for their own meetings.
Keep and send minutes. Someone other than the meeting organizer should take notes on the meeting. These minutes should record who attended, what was discussed, any agreements that were reached and all time and action items that were assigned – and who is responsible for them. That insures that those who attended all have the same information. Minutes …read more
Source: Harvey Mackay
