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It’s not easy changing company policies, or getting people to change their habits, or even introducing new tools into a workplace. People will always talk about how things have changed and the old ways of doing things were so much better, or they might even continue working the way they always did, ignoring any efforts to change how the company works. The same thing happens whether your business upgrades to a new version of Microsoft Office, when Facebook changes the way the Timeline looks, or even when you switch to a new brand of coffee.

It’s the same with meetings. People are used to meetings being a place where they push around bits of paper for an hour and munch on some biscuits, while they mentally write down their Saturday shopping list. They are used to meetings that don’t really get anything done, where decisions are postponed, and where nothing is written down, so that the next meeting has to start all over again. Even when you try to introduce a new system, or a new way of running meetings, it’s not easy to make the change.

So sometimes, you need to shake things up a little.

Stand up meetings

A tried and true method from the world of Agile development, where daily ‘standups’ are held. The daily stand-up meetings are an excellent place to keep the team updated about their various tasks and help each other where help is needed, and standing up prevents the meetings from carrying on for longer than strictly necessary. You don’t have to jump into daily meetings, certainly if it isn’t necessary, but standing up can certainly keep everyone on their feet. Literally.

Early/Late

Most meetings are held around lunch time (either just before or just after). Hold your next meeting at 8 a.m. sharp, or at 6 pm. Again, this doesn’t have to be the start of a brand new policy for all meetings, but for the first few you have this way, the complete change in the meeting schedule can be the baseline to show that other meeting conventions have changed as well.

Remove distractions

Turn off people’s cellphones, laptops, tablets and even Google Glasses, if they are lucky enough to have them. This is a bit drastic but again, you want to shake things up and hammer home the point that the meeting culture has changed, and you are taking the changes seriously – and you expect your team to do the same.

Bottom line is, don’t be afraid to make some significant changes to the way you manage your meetings. In the end, they will become more productive, and become what they should have been in the first place – an engine to drive your company forwards.

Put five monkeys in a cage with a ladder in the middle. Dangle a banana just above the ladder. Every time a monkey tries to climb the ladder to get the banana, spray the other monkeys with jets of freezing cold water.

After a while, you’ll see that every monkey that gets near the ladder will be pulled away by the other monkeys, who, obviously, don’t want to get soaked with cold water.

Now, take out one monkey, and replace it with a new one, one that doesn’t know the existing rules. Watch as he tries to climb the ladder (because who doesn’t want a banana?) and gets pulled down by his fellow monkeys – because they know what will happen.

Wait a bit, then take out another monkey, and replace him with a new one.

Repeat this process until you have five monkeys who none of which were part of the original experiment.

And they still won’t climb the ladder.

They all know that it isn’t allowed, even though none of them were ever sprayed with water.

And that’s how company culture is created.

The same goes for meetings you set up. Everybody KNOWS that you can’t have one without the CEO – they just aren’t really sure why. Everyone KNOWS that hour long meetings can go on for as long as necessary, even if it’s just the CMO rambling about the latest stock market update. Everyone KNOWS that meetings are just there to get in the way of real work, not a way to get work done more efficiently. And everyone knows that you don’t need an agenda, or even a goal, to set up a meeting involving half the company. You’ll probably think up a good reason on the way there.

But company culture and meeting culture can be changed.

So be the first to set an example! Next meeting, start off with sending the agenda two days early, and inviting five people instead of the usual fifteen. Then record what goes on, and send a task list once the meeting is over.

We think you’ll be amazed at the amount of change you can make.

*the monkey story has no specific origin, but there are quite a few references to it on Google.

 

I’ve been watching more than my fair share of cookery shows on the TV lately, and of course, meetings, and how to make them better, are never really far from my mind. So when I started really paying attention to these things, I noticed that cooking a good meal is just like managing a good meeting.

You start off with deciding what you want. Is it a light meal? A pot roast? Supper for the kids? Once you have your goal in mind, writing down your agenda is much easier finding the recipe is much easier.

Now you have the general idea of what you want to eat, you find a suitable recipe and study it – what vegetables you need, what sauces you’ll need to buy, what spices you need to stock up on, and preparing the general ingredients. In other words, making sure that you know the meeting’s agenda beforehand, and not starting a meeting by thinking ‘what are we going to talk about today?’

So you have your goal and your agenda. What’s next on the list? That’s right, actually preparing the food. Chopping up onions, adding salt and pepper, mixing in the tomatoes and carrots, making sure the water is at the right level, preparing some pea – what’s that? What about dessert? An excellent idea, but not now. Right now, you’re focused on your goal (the meal) and your agenda (the recipe). The dessert can go to the parking lot for now, and after you’ve finished what you are doing, and the project is launched the meal is ready to serve, you can (and should ) think about dessert.

I don’t know about you, but while I’m preparing a meal, I’m also mentally checking off tasks in my head that will need to be done when I’ve finished making the food, and all that’s left is to let it simmer for fifteen minutes. There’s tidying up to do, dishwasher to be stacked, table to be set, kids to be called and so on. Basically, it’s a list of tasks that need to be completed. By me and the kids. Which means that you have to list the tasks for them (at least once), remind them to do their tasks (at least three times), and follow up on the tasks to make sure they are done before the meal is complete.

And after the meal is over? You get feedback, and you know how to improve for next time .

So, if you:

1. Have a goal
2. Plan an agenda
3. Write down tasks
4. Follow them up
5. Learn how to improve

Then you’ll have better meetings AND better meals. And what could be better than that?

How many times have you heard the phrase “I HATE MEETINGS”? It can be before a board meeting, a team meeting or a company meeting – the sentiment remains the same. People hate meetings. Meetings are time wasters, meetings are set up by people who don’t know how to decide things on their own, or by people who just want to shoot the breeze around a table. Meetings are at best useless, at worst, wasteful.

And that is part of the problem. When people come to meetings expecting a negative outcome, then not only will they feel negative about everything, they will also affect everyone else around the meeting table and that will just reinforce their feelings about meetings.

So how do you break this cycle?

1. First and foremost, start having proper meetings. We’ve written about this time and again, but the basics are:
   • Have a goal
   • Write an agenda and send it to the participants a day before the meeting
   • WRITE THINGS DOWN – tasks, decisions, action items, dates.
   • Send the notes to all meeting participants
   • Follow up on the meeting tasks and decisions

 

2. Running proper meetings? Excellent. Now, don’t invite the people who hate meetings. It’s as simple as that. If you have a team member who doesn’t believe in meetings, and thinks they are a waste of time, no matter what he knows and how much you think he is relevant to the meeting, he won’t help. He’ll just be a liability. Don’t invite him. If you HAVE to hear his opinion about something, call him in, have him address the issue, then thank him and send him on his way. There are two options here – one, he’ll feel left out, certainly when the rest of the team is caught up in the enthusiasm of finally having effective meetings (you are following the steps in phase 1, right?), and ask to be invited, or two, you’ll find that this is a far more effective way to get his input, and everyone is happy.

 

3. Maybe you’ve been going at this the wrong way. Maybe your meetings, that look great on paper, really AREN’T very useful, and the people who ‘hate’ them don’t really hate them, but they don’t know how to give feedback very well. So sit down with the people who don’t like meetings. Don’t call it a meeting, by the way, or they will come predisposed to not listen to you. Sit down with a coffee by their table. Ask the questions, and try to understand. Did they ever have meetings that they DID approve of? What did they like about those meetings? What would they change about the meetings you set up to make them more effective? How would THEY run the meeting?

 

4. Have them run the next meeting. It’s a well-known fact that it’s far easier to look at something from the outside than actually do it. Have them write an agenda, plan out the meeting, invite the right people and preside over the proceeding. Again, it’s a win-win situation. Either they realize that meetings aren’t that easy to do as they thought, and making sure things follow an agenda (and don’t get bogged down in a discussion over a very specific issue between two people), while making sure that the tasks and decisions are being written down isn’t as simple as it looks, OR they are natural meeting organizers – in which case, congratulations, you’ve just found the person you can assign meetings to.

An agenda is part of a meeting’s building blocks.

Distractions are a sledgehammer.

I’m not talking about subjects that come up during meetings that aren’t on the agenda. These things are perfectly natural, as people discuss items. Sometimes, you want to put it in the parking lot. Other times, you’ll add it the agenda and discuss it. I’m talking about, shall we say, third-part distractions.

‘This won’t take a second’
How many times have you been in a meeting, where one of the attendee’s (or worse, the meeting organizer’s) mobile phone started ringing? Sometimes they ‘have to take this call, it won’t be a minute’, and sometimes they’ll just mutter ‘oh, it’s them again’, but whatever the case, it’s a distraction.

‘Sorry, didn’t know you were in a meeting’
Another common distraction are people coming into the meeting room. Even best case scenarios, which I have seen time and again, have the people apologizing for interrupting, and explaining that it isn’t that urgent and that they’ll come back later. Invariably, the person they come to see will ask them what it’s about, so they answer, and apologize again, and so on. A HUGE distraction.

‘I’ll just field this one’
Chats. What is it about Instant Messages – and they can be GTalk, Facebook messages, or Skype alerts, that make us want to see what they are immediately? In any case, they cause distractions. The person replying to his messages isn’t listening to you, isn’t contributing to the discussion, and certainly won’t be able to help with any decisions that you have to make.

Distractions.

Most of them are up to you to resolve. Hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door. Mute your phone. Turn off your IM. Do whatever it takes – because the meeting is important. These distractions aren’t.

Meetings at sports clubs should be managed just like any other meeting, if they are to be effective. Whether it is a monthly meeting of the soccer club, the hockey club annual general meeting, or the baseball board meeting, all sports clubs meetings should be properly run. Meetings are essential to effectively manage matters relating to your club, make decisions about the running of the club and decide on upcoming activities.

Meetings are a way to ensure the smooth running of all of the club’s functions and offer an opportunity to get the members involved in important matters. In most cases it is a legal requirement that clubs hold a certain number of meetings per year, and that those meetings should be documented. Documentation requirements often include posting the agenda before the meeting and making the minutes available after the meeting.

MeetingKing can help with these requirements and if you make your meeting public, which means the PDF versions of the agenda and minutes are publicly visible, you can even use it for free. No need to upload your documents to a server or web site just email or post the link to the minutes on MeetingKing.

Setting the agenda is a breeze there are even a number of standard agenda templates that you can use to quickly get started. Decisions made during sports club meetings can be noted into the minutes while the meeting is underway, and tasks assigned to people can be tracked through MeetingKing. Those assigned to organizing fixtures or logistics relating to games will automatically be reminded of any tasks that they are allocated using MeetingKing. This means that important sports club meeting decisions are not forgotten, but it is also an efficient way to manage sub committees.

Information about club registrations, coaching, fund raising events and other matters pertaining to the smooth running of the club can be kept in the minutes so that people can access them later and remember what was decided. When minutes are noted down, they should not be a detailed record of absolutely everything that was said, but instead they should cover the most important points, including decisions and action items.

Decisions reached at club meetings usually have to be agreed by a set number of people or “quorum” to be able to be implemented. The details of the number of people that voted for a particular decision can be recorded so that if decisions are challenged later, the information is available for other club members to review and see that the meeting was managed fairly. Often at sports club meetings, the financial matters of the club need to be discussed. The financial statements can be attached to the agenda in MeetingKing and circulated before the meeting to all attendees. This allows participants to review the statements beforehand and be ready with any questions that they have, meaning that the meeting can move along more quickly and cover the most important points.

The elected chairperson at the sports club meeting can control how the meeting stays on track by using the “Parking Lot”. If the discussion steers away from the points on the agenda, then items that may be important for discussion but not necessarily at this meeting can be added to the Parking Lot. This means that important issues do not get forgotten later. It is the role of the sports club meeting chairperson to be firm about sticking to the agenda, otherwise club members in attendance may get frustrated at the slow progress of the meeting.

Board members of sports clubs are often volunteers and since managing the club is not their day to day activity, an efficient way of documenting everything and managing tasks is extremely important. MeetingKing can help your club at no charge. Sign up now and try it for your next club meeting.

Many employees and appraisers dread performance review meetings. They create paperwork and administration that has to be carried out on both sides. Also, for the appraiser, such meetings usually require the passing on of constructive feedback to employees, which can be difficult.

Good performance review meetings however, can be very motivating and help a person and organization move forward and build a better bond.

Here are some tips to make performance review meetings more effective and run more smoothly:

• Make it a natural conversation, it is not about completing forms. Documentation is necessary to properly prepare and follow-up, but the essence of the meeting is having a good one-on-one conversation about work and goals.
• Review throughout the review period – keeping good notes on employee progress means that the whole review period can be properly assessed during the performance review. What often happens otherwise is that the review is skewed to the employee’s last couple of months and incidents that stick out in the appraiser’s mind. Keeping notes on a frequent basis prevents this happening. You may also consider increasing the frequency of your reviews. Quarterly review meetings are much more effective than annual review meetings and often feel less “artificial”. Having a shorter time frame to monitor progress (on both sides) is also much more motivating.
• Use the “feedback sandwich” – to give constructive feedback, the feedback sandwich is a useful tool that can be adopted. The way this works is to give positive feedback first and last, and sandwich the constructive feedback in the middle. For example, you might say something like: “You did really well with the organizing and planning of that project, well done!” and then listen to what the employee has to say. Then you could say something like, “Of course all plans we make have to change sometimes to match new situations that arise… how do you think you handled X change”?” The employee will respond and you can provide your observations as well. Then, to finish up, you can say something like “Overall though, the project met its objectives and you should be proud of your involvement with it”.
• SMART objectives – when setting objectives, these should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and with a Time frame. When objectives are SMART it is much easier (and fairer) to quantify whether an employee has achieved the objective or not.
• Do not discriminate – managers often have favorites, those people that they enjoy working with more and get along with better. That does not mean that the other employees did not do an excellent job. Nor does it mean that the “favorites” did a great job. Each employee should be reviewed on his or her own merits and performance throughout the review period. Of course, it should go without saying that discriminating on the basis of race, gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity and others is illegal and should not occur.
• Create a personal development plan – work with the employee on a Personal Development Plan. This should consider not just development areas specific to the job, but also areas that the employee wishes to develop in, which may lead to him or her being a more rounded employee in the workplace. This will help to make the employee more motivated for the upcoming review period, if they think their development needs are being addressed properly.

MeetingKing makes having performance reviews much easier. It reduces the paperwork involved and ensures that everything is stored safely online. This means the information can be easily found and referred back to when needed.

To get started you simply load the sample performance review template. You can use it as is, or modify it to meet your specific needs. During the meeting you can easily make notes and assign tasks for both the employee and the manager. With its built-in task manager, MeetingKing will help you make sure these tasks get done – MeetingKing will send reminders, the tasks are in the task list and for your next review meeting, MeetingKing will even add the tasks automatically to the agenda.

Both the employee and the manager can add comments to notes and tasks and the review can easily be shared with the human resources department and department manager by adding them to the CC list.

Regular personnel performance review meetings will help a person and organization to focus on long term improvements. Seeing progress is the best motivator for anyone.

Dedication is often measured in the number of hours people spend at the office, but research has shown over and over again that having a healthy balance between work and other activities leads to much higher productivity.

Problem with corporate America is that we are all looking at each other and consider face time to be the measure for commitment and often even success. Especially in larger organizations it is often hard to point out who contributed what. This makes it easy to hide behind the group if things don’t work out, but for a successful project it is also hard to point out who contributed most effectively. The easiest way then is to look at who spend the most time in the office……..

It is not about the number of hours you put into a project or you work, it is about the results you generate. Properly documenting your meetings, setting an agenda and distributing minutes, and having an easy to use team task list that tracks who does what and when, will help to move a project or organization forward AND will show who is actually delivering results. It is about getting things done, not about how much time you spend on it.

This week there was in interesting article on Inc.com Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week. This should be lesson for all of us. Work can be fun and interesting, but there is more to life than the office.

Meeting facilitation is the art of making meetings run smoother. Meeting facilitators help meeting participants to stick to an agenda and progress through that agenda without getting stuck on difficult issues. It is the responsibility of the meeting facilitator to make sure that everyone gets an opportunity to contribute to the meeting, and meeting facilitation involves being responsible to everyone at the meeting, not just the person that asked for meeting facilitation.

One of the reasons for having a meeting facilitator is that sometimes it can be hard to come to a consensus when there are so many different and maybe conflicting points of view about a particular issue. Meeting facilitation can help groups of people to work through these issues to move forward and progress.

Meeting facilitation is not limited to simply introducing everyone at the meeting and asking for points of view from different people. Rather, meeting facilitation requires the facilitator to be able to think on his/her feet and come up with objective suggestions that help to smooth the way forward, especially when difficult decisions are being discussed. The best meeting facilitators may come from outside the department or team holding the meeting, but that is not necessarily the case. Either way, the meeting facilitation must be unbiased and performed by an individual that does not have a direct interest in the outcome of the meeting.

The meeting facilitator must understand and communicate the goal of the meeting at the outset. This will help the facilitator to steer the meeting towards reaching that goal. Throughout the meeting, the facilitator should have the end goal in mind, making sure that everyone is working towards that goal. If not, it is the job of the facilitator to get the meeting back on track, and/or bring it back to the agenda if it has strayed.

Meeting facilitation can work well with tools to keep it on track. With its built-in agenda, task allocation, minutes and parking lot, MeetingKing can be a useful tool for this purpose. A tool with an agenda helps the facilitator to coordinate the meeting and keep it on track, while directly after the meeting, minutes can be distributed to the attendees to remind them of any decisions and action items agreed to. Having a parking lot is particularly useful, as it allows facilitators to move particular issues to the side if they are not directly relevant to the outcome of the meeting, while ensuring that they do not get forgotten about.

Meeting facilitation can involve anything from guiding a discussion through to planning and structuring a meeting so that it will reach the desired outcome. To facilitate effectively, it is important that the meeting facilitator states the “rules” of the meeting at the outset. These may include not talking over one another, how to raise points, not going off track, or subjects that are not to be included, among others. If these rules are broken, the facilitator should not be shy about stepping in, as this will keep the meeting on topic.

Finally, with meeting facilitation it is important that everyone gets a chance to have their say. The facilitator should keep an eye on attendees to make sure that they are involved and included in the meeting. If they seem as if they are pulling back, it is the role of the facilitator to bring them back in again, perhaps by asking them what they think about a particular subject.

Virtual meetings are more and more frequently becoming standard day-to-day business practice, and businesses need to understand how to run remote meetings effectively. However, running an in-person meeting is still far more frequent of an occurrence in organizations, and many can benefit from learning how to increase effectiveness in this area.

Every meeting can benefit from an agenda. An agenda adds structure to a meeting, and lets participants know what subject matters are to be covered. It allows participants to think through their views on different subjects ahead of the meeting, and to be prepared for them. During an in-person meeting, it is easier to keep on-subject when a paper, or on-screen agenda can be referred back to. Preparing and updating an agenda is often ignored because it is a time consuming activity if you use the traditional combination of email and Word. MeetingKing makes it easy – participants can add topics and attachments to the agenda, you can change the sequence of topics, tasks from previous meeting are automatically added to the agenda and you can email the agenda with one click.

Back to in-person meetings; body language is one huge benefit of holding in-person meetings. It is much easier to gauge exactly what a person thinks or feels about any particular issue if they are face-to-face, rather than online. For example, leaning forward and making eye contact usually indicates that a participant is interested in or passionate about a particular subject, whereas leaning back, arms folded and with a distant look on a person’s face may mean that a person is either not engaged, or is outright hostile towards an opinion or a subject area. Learning about what different classic body language means can be of great assistance in running an in-person meeting effectively as it helps the organizer to pick up on those more subtle hints about what is going on with particular individuals or groups.

Being organized is an essential part of running an in-person meeting effectively. It can be very frustrating for meeting attendees to wait around for a meeting organizer who is trying to find the right page in a document to refer to, or who is spending precious meeting time trying to get the projector to work properly. MeetingKing allows all meeting documentation referred to within a meeting to be stored in one place, meaning that attendees can all have access to it easily. This facilitates a more effective preparation and running of meetings. This allows both meeting organizers and meeting participants to be better organized about meetings.

Where in-person meetings are to be held at meal times, such as at breakfast or during lunch hours (between midday and 2pm) it may be useful for the meeting organizer to advise if refreshments will be provided at the meeting or not. If not, this allows participants to be prepared in advance by choosing to eat beforehand if need be.

Task management is essential to any meeting. Minutes should be taken and actions assigned. In-person meetings can be improved in effectiveness by using a tool such as MeetingKing to help coordinate and manage such tasks. If nobody keeps minutes, and no tasks are written down, it is all too easy for participants to afterwards claim that they do not remember agreeing to a task. With MeetingKing, very simple notes can be made during the meeting, and tasks assigned on the spot and after the meeting you can automatically email nicely formatted minutes and automatic task reminders without any additional work.

It is clear that good, well-run in-person meetings require good tools to support them. MeetingKing serves as just the tool to add the kind of structure needed to in-person meetings to make them effective.