Gripe of the Day

A past colleague of mine had the brilliant idea to begin each meeting with a Gripe of the Day. It replaced the cheery icebreaker, but in a productive way. Each person at the meeting had to state their gripe of the day, and once that was completed the group had a sense of moving on. So once you got your chosen gripe out of the way, you were more likely to get down to business and leave your other gripes behind for the duration of the meeting.

Start on time, please.

Please start your meeting on time. I went to a meeting this morning. It was my first time with this group. I thought I had arrived at the wrong time, because there wasn't hardly anyone there yet. The room wasn't yet set up for the meeting either. But I was there on time, and nearly no one else was. I found out from my neighbor at the meeting that the meetings never start on time, and everybody knows that, so no one arrives on time. So much about meetings are about respect. And I think it shows respect to start your meeting on time.

Mute the conference call

Most of the posts thus far have dealt with in-person meetings. But we all often do meet by conference call these days. And a meeting by phone appears to bring a whole new set of challenges to the art of meeting. First and foremost, I think a conference call that has any kind of presentation element, followed by a question and answer period, has to be automatically muted. I know this must be expensive, but cost must be weighed against the waste of resources associated with a call that is disrupted by background noise, or better yet, the clueless, annoying person who thinks they are muted when they are not (imagine dog barking, intra-office gossip, keyboard clacking, etc.).

Meeting Ticker

A friend and colleague, Stacey, suggested I check out this Meeting Ticker website. In her words it is an awareness tool, perhaps designed to scare (or shame) us into running effective meetings.
Being in the sexual health field, I don't know that I believe in the scare tactics or shame and blame game, but I really like the idea of this website forcing us to think about how we are spending our staff time in meetings. For example, sitting around talking about your organization's money troubles without dedicated focus to addressing those challenges is wasteful.

http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/

Meeting juju

I think I've referred to "juju" in some of my previous posts. I was having coffee with a friend and colleague yesterday and we were discussing the need to work through some of what I call bad juju in meetings. She thought it best when people can just lay it all on the table, and work through whatever interpersonal challenges or power struggles might be causing the meeting struggles. I contend that a Lay It All on the Table strategy requires a fair amount of self awareness from the meeting participants. And if that self awareness doesn't exist, you can't work through the juju.

Unproductive meetings = unproductive staff

When I was in graduate school, we were required to take a class in management. It wasn't a bad class, not a great one either. But one of the things I do remember vividly was a discussion about unproductive meetings leading to an unproductive work place. I recall the professor citing some research that showed that sitting through bad meetings was the #1 reason why people sought employment elsewhere. So let's all re-commit to trying ways to make our meetings more productive, and thereby making our entire workplaces more productive.

Who is working the agenda?

OK, great. You realized that you needed an agenda. You created your agenda based on what you need to get accomplished. Now do you have someone to work the agenda? This is related to an earlier post re: "who's in charge here". It can be pretty darn frustrating to participate in a meeting that has a clear agenda, but the agenda is not used. Find someone who has the skills to lead your meeting and work the agenda, whether it's something that just comes to them naturally, or is something that they've learned how to do. And if for whatever reason the agenda is not right, rely on that leader to revise the agenda with the group and get back to work.

What is on the agenda?

So you read my earlier post and you realized you need to have an agenda. Now what should be on your meeting agenda? I believe meetings should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that your agenda should guide you through. You start the meetings with your introductions or your icebreaker or whatever you need to get your meeting started. You get your work done (the bulk of the agenda). You wrap it up and confirm what your next steps are. Simple, right?

Where is the agenda?

If you're going to have a meeting, you've got to have an agenda. OK, OK, again, I realize that I'm coming from one way of looking at organizing the world and our lives in it, but still, you've got to have an agenda. You can type it up and photocopy it and hand it out. You can write it up on a white board. You can put your heads together at the start of the meeting and scratch it out with ballpoint pen on a piece of notebook paper. But I believe you've got to have one in order to have a successful meeting.

Recognition

One of my coworkers has been talking a lot about the need for employee recognition at our organization's All Staff meetings. It's got me thinking. But I don't think we're quite ready for it yet. I only think public recognition in a meeting is useful and warranted when you have some important things in place. First, you've got to have a clear process for how someone earns recognition. Then you've got to have the right messenger deliver the recognition. And finally, it's got to warranted and honest and worthwhile.