Do you employees arrive late to meetings?

Do you spend too much time planning a meeting that seems to be wasted?

Do you struggle to engage everyone in the meeting?

Meeting Management is an important management skill.

Meetings can be difficult to manage, especially when we are becoming more and more time poor with people’s job descriptions growing and expanding. However, meetings can be great tools within the workplace to ensure everyone is on the same page, set a company culture, keep people accountable and delegate roles. Here are a few more tips on meetings for you to consider…

What’s wrong with meetings?

According to Roger Mosvick and Robert Nelson in ‘We’ve Got to Start Meeting Like This’, managers and professionals polled on the specific problems of meetings listed 1305 problems. Sixteen of these accounted for 90 per cent of the problems. Here they are:

  1. Getting off the subject
  2. No goals or agenda
  3. Too lengthy
  4. Poor or inadequate preparation
  5. Inconclusive
  6. Disorganised
  7. Ineffective leadership/lack of control
  8. Irrelevance of information discussed
  9. Time wasted
  10. Starting late
  11. Not effective for making decisions
  12. Interruptions
  13. Individuals dominate discussion
  14. Rambling, redundant or digressive discussion
  15. No published results of follow-up action
  16. No pre-meeting orientation.

Meeting Management Tip 1

Effective chairpersons see ‘time’ as a key to successful meetings. In this regard, says Robert Burns in ‘Making Meetings Happen’, they:

  • start on time
  • announce a finishing time for the meeting
  • allow time for breaks, announced in advance
  • limit the number of items on the agenda to the time allowed
  • allocate in advance a time limit by the side of each agenda item
  • keep discussion on track to ensure decisions are made within those set time allocations
  • prepare procedures in advance to deal with any unresolved business if time runs out.

How to encourage involvement

Management Skills on Meetings. Study Meeting Management online with Global Training institute

As chair of a meeting, you can encourage the involvement of participants by:

  • making all staff feel relaxed about getting involved, assuring them that all contributions will be valued.
  • seeking different points of view.
  • allowing all issues to be openly discussed and debated.
  • noticing who is not contributing and seeking ways to get them involved.
  • limiting the involvement critical contributors in favour of creative participants
  • helping others express themselves by seeking clarification
  • keeping the discussion balanced, seeking differing views, mediating as required.
  • recognising the existence of individual talent and expertise, calling on these individuals to shine whenever the opportunity arises.
  • offer thanks when credit is due.

Robert Burns in Making Meetings Happen.

Meetings: In a nutshell

The basics of managing a meeting, according to Donald Walton in ‘Are You Communicating?’ (McGraw Hill, NY, 1989) are very simple and very few. They can be boiled down to these fundamentals:

  • Adequate advance information. Give participants enough time and information so they can come prepared to contribute intelligently.
  • A clear objective. Expect to accomplish one thing. State this clearly; maybe write it on a blackboard before proceeding.
  • An agenda. Outline the discussion structure in writing. Pull the discussion back on track whenever the meeting begins to wander from it.
  • Brevity. Allocate the time to be taken in advance. Start on time. End on time – or earlier.
  • A small group. The meeting will get out of hand with more than 12 participants. Half that number is far better. Accomplishment is likely to be in inverse proportion to attendance.
  • Decisions for action. Decide actions to be taken, by whom, and by what dates. Confirm it all in a brief follow-up memo to all participants.

 Ineffective meetings

Research cited by Robert Burns in ‘Making Meetings Happen’ (p..5) reveals that, in a survey of 635 business managers, 75% were concerned by the ineffectiveness of typical meetings they attended. Specifically, they listed their concerns as:

  • Drifting off subject
 83%
  • Poor preparation
 77%
  • Lack of listening by chair
 68%
  • Verbosity of participants
 62%
  • Length of meeting
 60%
  • Lack of participation
 51%

His research also revealed that many business meetings are ineffectively organised and run, and that most managers need to enhance their meeting skills (p.14). He revealed through survey the unflattering percentage of managers who say they always:

  • Define a meeting’s purpose
 66%
  • Address each item on the agenda
 62%
  • Assign follow-up action
 59%
  • Make a record of the discussion
 47%
  • Invite only essential participants
 46%
  • Write an agenda with time frames
 36%

 

If you are interested in equipping yourself with skills such as these, we encourage you to consider studying online! At Global Training Institute we offer a wide variety of online qualifications and online short courses (Meeting Management) for people in many different industries and positions. Some of these include the Certificate IV in Frontline Management, Diploma of Management, Diploma of Customer Engagement, Diploma of Project Management, Certificate IV in Civil Construction Supervision, Diploma of Civil Construction Management, Diploma of Business and more! All qualifications are in line with the standards set by the Australian Qualifications Framework and will provide you with essential skills and knowledge to become more effective in your current position, as well as preparing for promotion!

Contact us on 1800 998 500 or [email protected]!