Issues That Make Meetings Ineffective
No one looks forward to meetings when they have a full inbox of tasks waiting to be accomplished. There is nothing more frustrating than to finally make headway against the growing mountain of responsibilities, only to spend three hours in a hot, stuffy meeting room while the clock mocks your impatience. At the end of the meeting, everyone has the same thought. ‘What a waste of time that was.’ The bad news is, meetings will never go away. There is good news. Meetings can be productive, providing the leader or manager reconstructs how meetings are handled. William Daniels, an American Consulting & Training senior consultant had this to say on the matter.
"Meetings matter because that's where an organization's culture perpetuates itself. Meetings are how an organization says, 'You are a member.' So if every day we go to boring meetings full of boring people, then we can't help but think that this is a boring company. Bad meetings are a source of negative messages about our company and ourselves."
With the advent of collaboration services, including Microsoft SharePoint, email, and other related communication solutions, getting your message across should be simpler, with less effort and unproductive time spent. And less meetings. It can be achieved, as long as you, the manager strives to eliminate the reasons meetings fail. For instance, as a whole, meetings are not takes seriously. Notice how many people show up after the meeting has started, or hold up the commencement of the meeting. Notice how many leave early, and pass the time drawing on their notepads instead of actively paying attention. Meetings have to be viewed as actual work, not time away from their efforts spent in a trivial manner. Just as the accumulating pile of folders on their desks is seen as work that has to be done, a meeting has to be seen as an extension of work. Some companies provide courses detailing how managers and executives should conduct meetings that inspire and bring effectiveness. Topics include a solid meeting plan, concise issues, and how they will be discussed and completed.
Another area in need of improvement is the length of the meeting. A meeting should follow a two to one ratio, executing and fulfilling twice as much productivity in one half of the time. Lengthy meetings cost time and money. One survey conducted by James Rieley of the Milwaukee Area Technical College and its director in the Center for Continuous Quality Improvement, proved that point. James accumulated the time spent in meetings by the one hundred and thirty member management council, and multiplied that time by their respective salaries. His survey ascertained the college spent three million dollars in an annual basis on time spent in management council meetings. From that standpoint, the college decided to train as many as forty individuals as meeting assistants whose position is to keep meetings moving forward and on track.
At the Institute for Better Meetings, the founder, Bernard DeKoven, created a software solution named the Meeting Meter. Its purpose is to provide continuous calculations that determine how much a meeting costs the company or organization. The software accepts each name and salary of the meeting attendees, then the clock starts. DeKoven states his software makes productive meetings the priority. "When I use the meter, I don't just talk about the cost of meetings. I talk about the cost of bad meetings. Because bad meetings lead to even more meetings, and over time the costs become awe-inspiring."
Other companies utilize ‘meetingware’, software designed to enhanced productivity. GroupSystems V allows attendees to put their ideas and comments into workstations, where the text is organized and placed on a monitor for everyone to view. This way, a process of simultaneous ideas and productivity is achieved, as the amount of ideas are flowing and increasing much faster.
Meetings have a tendency to run long as individuals stray away from the main conversation or meeting point. Distractions lengthen meeting time and generally do not add to the productivity. People need to remain close to the agenda or meeting plan, which becomes an impossibility if one does not exist. Some corporations rely on meeting agenda templates, dispensed to attendees a few days before the actual meeting. This way, everyone has the opportunity to know what is ahead and on point for discussion. Meetings need a structured approach, including who has complete responsibility of the meeting, who will make decisions concerning input and ideas from the group, how voting will be performed, and final agreement. This method eliminates tangent issues not related to the agenda, and allows for the straying ideas to be annotated according to the topic and who provided it, for future analysis and discussion.
When meetings end, the content of the meeting is left in the room. Meeting decisions must be acted upon for the meeting to have purpose. Note taking and the accumulation of what was discussed invades every meeting. Yet the collection of information lies dormant once everyone returns to their desks. Collaboration software keeping track of the meeting content, displaying it for all to see brings the focus on the meeting discussions. Once printed and dispersed, everyone has a hard copy of outlines, responsibilities, proposals, and various insights and ideas.
Many meetings lack truthfulness. Attend a meeting where someone asks a question with potential answers that hits home. How many people speak up and honestly provide their opinions? Everyone feels intimidation, or the person in charge of the meeting fails to lobby for everyone’s participation. And there is a feeling of insecurity in the room. Once again, technology comes to the rescue. Provide meeting attendees with computer utilities allowing them to give their opinions without declaring who they are. Now free speech is in action, and the leader discovers much more about what is floating around in everyone’s minds, or what is going on behind the scenes.
Meetings that lack the necessary information are painful. Issues are tabled until another time, and consume meetings and productivity in a future date. Meeting rooms need to contain the ability to immediately access information, not isolate the participants from the data. One meeting ergonomist (one who maximizes productivity) believes meeting locations, especially for projects, need to have material storage space, allocated for keeping whatever information is necessary to breed productive meetings. "People are constantly hauling materials to and from meeting rooms. It's much easier to just store things for later meetings."
Meetings also fail when they continue to make the mistakes over and over again. Meetings should include in their minutes a list of things that were good, and areas that were bad. Over time, the list can be analyzed and change can be injected into a meeting. If not, the same meeting methodology is repeated. DeKoven believes, "People don't have good meetings because they don't know what good meetings are like. Good meetings aren't just about work. They're about fun -- keeping people charged up. It's more than collaboration, it's 'coliberation' -- people freeing each other up to think more creatively."
PMP certification training follows the Project Management Book of Knowledge. Certification training, such as the superior training courses located at K Alliance training, instills the best practices to follow, procedures to improve project management, and a deeper understanding of successful manager’s methodology and how to conduct effective project creation and deployments.
About Us: SSC Training is a prime location and source of powerful desktop training courses and IT training tutorials. Expert certified instructors lead you in the best training available, with you as the recipient of quality training, new career opportunities, and certification training towards higher salaries and recognition. Online Microsoft Project training videos are a godsend to project managers in search of breaking the barrier to successful project delivery. SSC Training is your best resource of training fulfillment.