Conduct Effective Meetings

Do you need to bring employees together to hold a meeting at all? Often communications can be relayed effectively to one or two people through an e-mail, a phone call or even a stroll over to a nearby desk. Does the subject really require discussion, or it is a matter of reporting on the status or conveying information?

Employee meetings generate both benefits and drawbacks. Bringing people together can create a team feeling of learning and collaboration. “It’s a chance to motivate and build cohesion,” says Ben Dattner, professor of organizational psychology at New York University. “Or it can be a process that de-motivates and creates frustration.” Taking staff away from their regular duties involves significant costs, beyond the compensation of those attending. “If they are supposed to be supervising other employees or subs, a lack of supervision can result in decreased productivity,” notes Walt Mathieson, a consultant in Glendale, Ariz.

Management experts offer some suggestions for making necessary meetings more effective.

Agenda
Start with a specific agenda, and circulate it ahead of time, along with well-crafted materials. That way, participants can be informed from the beginning, and can focus on the highest value-added activities at the meeting itself, like debating or sharing best practices, rather than just receiving information. Pressing issues also may emerge during the circulation stage. You may want to leave some extra time at the end for discussing open matters.

At the beginning of a meeting, stick to a couple of routine questions, suggests Victoria G. Axelrod, president of Axelrod Becker Consulting in New York. Stick to questions like:

• Does anyone need help?
• Who has something to share to move the project forward?

People will be prepared to contribute more meaningful input when they know the drill.

Time
If possible, keep meetings short and to the point. “Diminishing returns set in if they go on too long,” Dattner warns. Strive to restrict them to an hour or two at most, or you will see participants’ attention lag. If you are dealing with critical matters, and cannot cut down the time arbitrarily, break up the session into several increments. Begin and end on time. Axelrod even has a radical suggestion to keep within an allotted time frame of 10 or 15 minutes: make people stand the whole time. A less draconian ploy might be to postpone lunch until the meeting is completed.

Leadership
A chairperson should take charge of the agenda. That individual’s role not only is to raise topics and encourage a variety of viewpoints, but also to guide the group toward seeking a solution, ideally then and there. There are benefits to rotating the chairmanship formally: to spread the experience among staff, depending on levels of involvement and familiarity with issues. Remember that leadership is a learned trait, developed first by observing and then by doing. (“The military will tell you that,” Mathieson says.) It can be challenging to control personal egos, venting and other time-wasting distractions.

Focus
Limit the number of topics you cover. Three to five subjects are a reasonable number, Axelrod says. While you must take care that people do not feel excluded, try to restrict the number of participants to those who are required in order to keep a high level of engagement.

Accountability
Establish clear accountability to prevent excuses. Just as you may use a punch list of outstanding items to fix or resolve a project, keep a to-do list for the meeting group. You may not wish to document everything discussed, which would create an extra layer of paper. But it is helpful to keep a written agenda and handwritten notes filed in an agenda book. “It can take the place of convenient or inconvenient memories,” Mathieson says.

Follow Up
Hold everyone’s feet to the fire. It is appropriate to follow up an action plan with a review of accomplishments at subsequent meetings. Reward those achievements and establish consequences for items not accomplished.