Small Talk: Making your meetings effective

The reason most often cited by managers and business owners for not being able to execute their plans is that they are stuck in too many meetings, mostly with colleagues rather than clients. The slippery slope of meeting madness, where the only time you get to do your work is outside of office hours, seems to be the disease of many large organisations, but can infiltrate SMEs too.

The following tips have proven valuable to SME businesses by helping to maximise meeting time and ensure they provide a return on the time invested.

The time spent in meetings should be ideally split between 20 per cent for updates and 80 per cent for the collective use of the brains. Be careful not to hold a meeting where each person provides an update to the others, leaving no room for discussion or debate.

Proven tips

n If participants need to read or review data prior to the meeting in order to optimise time, then ensure this happens. The ultimate goal of a meeting should be to gather input or perspectives on issues, share intelligence and ideas and collaborate on challenges.

n Label or brand meetings with a clear purpose and differentiate one meeting from another. Ensure the right invitees to contribute to the outcomes required.

n Setting a meeting rhythm can help balance your time between quick updates and more intense opportunities for debate. For a fast growth company, the meeting rhythm should move between short daily huddles, more detailed weekly and monthly meetings, and strategic quarterly reviews.

This can also help companies accelerate the pace at which tasks get completed. If you only meet at the end of the month and everyone has four weeks to complete their tasks, you can guarantee they will do them in the last week before the next meeting. However, weekly meetings with actions lists help to ensure tasks are completed each week or perhaps every fortnight.

n Weekly meetings can sometimes slip into a routine where the same agenda is covered and monotony sets in. This means attendees are no longer actively present, resulting in no debate or interaction. A fixed agenda can also mean the most important topic for discussion is left until the last minute of the meeting and then rushed. Patrick Lencioni in his book Death by Meetings, recommends a ‘lightening round' approach, which has proven to work well in dynamic, fast growth businesses.

At the beginning of the meeting everyone is asked to share any topics that need to be discussed. Each topic is recorded but not discussed at this stage. Once all the issues are on the table, they are ranked by importance, followed by urgency. If a topic is important and requires research and preparation, it should be tabled for a future meeting.

The team can then discuss each of the ranked items agreeing on clear actions to be taken. Through this approach the weekly meeting will still have a structure,but the content is flexed depending on pressing issues.

n A ‘who, what, when' review records each action, the person accountable and provides an end date for the task. These last two points often lead to confusion.

The person accountable is someone who is going to make sure the action is completed. They might not complete the action in isolation, however, they are the ‘go to' person for that action and ultimately need to make sure a result is achieved.

You can't have more than one person accountable, even if you have a number of people involved in the task.

Sometimes end dates are replaced with start dates. This happens when a task or project is broken down into stages. In these cases, you need to record the start date for the next stage.

n A final recommendation is to record the amount of time as a CEO or founder of the business you are spending in routine meetings and make sure it is no more than ten per cent of your time.

The writer is the head of Biz-group, a Dubai based consultancy.