Effective meeting

Good day...

I believe that as a project manager, your schedule must be full of meetings, am I right? At least it is the case with my schedule. If you happen to see my working calendar once, you will see colotherful lines of meeting overlapping one another.

The question is, whether all of the meetings are effective? Do we reach the objective of each meeting, or it is just a group of people spending time together without a conclusion? Do we have the right audience in your meeting? When we should have 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours ,or even longer meetings?

Again, based on my experience, below are some tips I would like to share with you on holding effective meetings:

Picture credit: StartupStockPhotos

1. First of all, you need to make sure that it is absolutely necessary to have a meeting. For cases you can discuss informally or directly with your colleague, you might not need to call for a meeting. While for topics you believe more people are need to be involved and a formal discussion should take place, then it is deemed necessary for you to call for a meeting.

2. Make sure that you invite all and only the necessary people to your meeting. Inviting too many people to a meeting will lead to ineffective discussion. This is particularly true when some of them are not relevant to the discussion. You will end up having too many opinions, which might be confusing in many cases. On the other hand, not having the key people in the meeting will lead to difficulty in reaching a consensus to a discussion and you might miss valuable input from some experts.

3. Always come prepared with a pre-defined agenda and make sure that the agenda is well socialized to all participants prior to the meeting. It is really important to make sure that the participants come with some preparation or at least are well equipped with the discussion topic, to which they can do preliminary research or prior discussion with their respective teams.

4. Try your best to share the material one day in advance, particularly when your meeting participants involve higher level management. It is always good to let them read through the material and prepare some questions or decisions beforehand.

5. Always come on time to meetings, especially when it is your meeting. Give maximum five minutes tolerance for late comers and start the meeting immediately afterward. Appreciate the ones that have come on time. With this discipline, people will respect that your meeting starts on time and will make their best effort to be punctual. Similarly important, wrap up the meeting on time as the participants might have another schedule following the meeting.

6. Should an agreement is not yet achieved approaching end of the meeting time, make agreement with all relevant participants to schedule for a follow up meeting.

7. Lastly and with the same importance, as a meeting organizer you must make sure that yourself or someone else is making minutes of meeting. Although in some meetings it might not be necessary to record detail conversation taking place in the meeting, key decisions and agreed action plan must always be documented. It is best to share the meetings summary within the same day, if not immediately after the meeting.

Personally, I would also encourage that you focus during any meeting you are attending. Multitasking by replying e-mails or whatsapp chat during the meeting might be seen as either not respecting other participants, or, resulting in yourself missing important points of the discussion.

Edwin