An all company meeting is expensive and I am not talking about the expense of providing donuts for everyone. If you broke down what you paid each person per hour and added it up the ROI on a companywide meeting needs to pretty substantial. This isn’t to say that meetings aren’t necessary but often times they are unfortunately inefficient. Some of the inefficiencies stem from setup and logistics others are from mob rules mindset that can take over, and others are lack of discipline.
The logistics of getting everyone started on a meeting on time in a centralized or decentralized workplace often time seems to be big hurdle. The meeting software doesn’t work or not everyone arrives on time the amount of time and dollars wasted in not starting on time. What would happen if people took meeting start more seriously? How much time could be saved in a year? What else could you do with the time and money saved? If you could reward people for starting a meeting on time would the behavior change? How about mob rules and someone hijacks a meeting? Or you have invited people who don’t feeling like it is necessary for them to be there? You now have missed your meeting goal. If you have people in your meeting who don’t want to be there how efficient and effective is your meeting going to be? How often have you sat in a meeting and had it derailed because a few members have decided to deep dive on one of the topics? How much are you paying the rest of the members to sit there and listen to the deep dive? It is hard to be disciplined about deep diving when you finally gather people together and they are passionate about a subject or see a chance to resolve it.
- Have a standard system for the technology in meeting is a way of improving the efficiency.
- Starting meeting on time whomever is present will encourage people to show up on time or miss important points.
- Ending the meeting on time is another technique if you miss covering a point and have to cover it in another meeting it might encourage people to be there on time rather than sit through another meeting.
- Having the person who called the meeting publish the agenda 24 hours before the meeting will help people know whether or not they are actually needed at the meeting and will prevent it being hijacked onto other topics.
- Having an agenda and way to mark topics as important for a further deep dive also helps with discipline because the expectations are clear to everyone before hand.
Comment below and tell me how you have improved your meetings?
