Make meetings less dreaded: turn those groans into raves when you conduct effective meetings using these simple steps

HR Magazine, Jan, 2007 by Stuart R. Levine

Mention the word "meetings" to a group of managers and you're likely to hear at least one person groan. Meetings are the bane of our existence--the thing we love to loathe. Who doesn't have a horror story to tell about the guy who won't zip it or the perennial "devil's advocate" who never has an idea of his own. My favorite is the person who can turn any conversation into an opportunity to grind the same old ax about something that happened 10 years earlier.

But the problem goes way beyond dealing with these kings and queens of wasting everyone's time. Ineffectively run meetings cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year and become career stoppers for managers. People and their time are your company's resources, and it's your job as the manager to maximize the value of both to the organization.

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Financial Hemorrhages

When working with a client several years ago, I asked the senior- and mid-level managers three questions:

* What percentage of your time do you spend in meetings?

* What percentage of your meetings have a clearly defined objective?

* If there is a clear objective, what percentage of the time do you achieve it?

It turns out they were spending approximately 70 percent of their time in meetings, the meetings had clear objectives only about 40 percent of the time, and they achieved their objectives only about 28 percent of the time.

How does that translate to real dollars? Say you have a two-hour staff meeting on Tuesdays. Ten people participate and each makes $60,000 a year plus benefits. Your direct cost for each meeting is about $300 per hour. Then, factor in that, on average, employees are expected to contribute 2.5 times what they cost, so the collective value of their time is $750 per hour.

What if each week at least one person is 20 minutes late and everyone else waits? Then it takes a few minutes to get started, so you routinely get down to business about 30 minutes after the established start time. Each week, you're burning $375. If it happens 50 times a year, this habit costs more than $18,000 a year.

Multiply that number by four if you're dealing with senior executives. And that's just one meeting.

What if the generally accepted meeting behavior is for people to be late and then spend the first few minutes catching up on the city's latest sporting event? Poor meeting discipline is a major financial hemorrhage, and frankly, as a manager, it's your job to keep it in check. When we did this math for the company I mentioned above, we discovered that they were wasting nearly half of their fully loaded managerial payroll.

Get out of The 'Event' Mind-Set

Meetings are not events. Effective meetings take place on a continuum of thoughtful preparation before the meeting, focused execution during the meeting and diligent follow-through after the meeting.

Sloppiness in any of these areas can jeopardize a meeting's effectiveness. By limiting your view of meetings to what happens in the room, you set yourself up for failure from the start. If your meeting is well planned, and follow-through is carefully defined and monitored, the odds of achieving your goals go up exponentially.

As a management consultant who works mostly with CEOs at the strategic level, I've had the opportunity to observe many organizations at work and the following steps are the best practices I see that help people save time and get more done.

Meetings that reflect these best practices become valued opportunities to communicate and learn instead of resented gauntlets we're required to run.

Before Anyone Convenes

The following steps will help you and your meeting attendees prepare for the meeting:

* Define your purpose. Without clarity about what you're trying to achieve, there is no way to achieve it effectively. Once the purpose is defined, you can answer several key questions, such as: Do I really need a meeting? Who really needs to be there? What information will they need in advance to accomplish what I'm asking them to? How long will it take? In the absence of a clear purpose, you're just guessing on these key questions and the odds of your wasting resources goes up.

* Create an agenda. This one sounds so simple, but I find that it's overlooked a stunning percentage of the time, even with senior people. Always create an agenda to focus the conversation on your purpose and always begin the agenda with a clear purpose statement. It's the first step in holding everyone involved accountable for achieving it.

If you are a participant and there's no agenda, ask for one. One CEO I worked with refused to participate in any meeting without an agenda and told his team to do the same. That company experienced real change that improved meetings and, in fact, strengthened its culture.

Of course, you have to be CEO to set that kind of policy. But wherever you sit in an organization, if you attend a meeting with no agenda on the table, you can say, "I'd like to have a sense of what we're here to accomplish and sketch out a quick agenda." Your time has value, and you have every right to demand it's well used.