The Square Orange

Effective Meetings

Your meeting should be an event that produces results or outcomes and not the "process of meeting." Things need to get accomplished. To improve the results of a meeting, begin by defining and improving the meeting process and people's commitments to it.

According to a study by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (as cited in Forbes, 10/25/93)

• The average meeting takes place in the company conference room and 11 in the morning and lasts an hour and 30 minutes.
• It is attended by nine people -- two managers, four co-workers, two subordinates and one outsider -- who have received two hour prior notification
• It has no written agenda, and its purported purpose is complete only 50% of the time.
• A quarter of meeting participants complain they waste between 11 and 25 percent of the time discussing irrelevant issues
• A full third of them feel pressured to publicly espouse opinions with which they privately disagree. Another third feel they have minimal or no influence on the discussion
• Although 36% of meetings result in a "complete" resolution of the topic at hand, participants considered only one percent of those conclusions to be particularly creative.
• A whopping 63% of meeting attendees feel that underlying issues outside the scope of the official agenda are the real subjects under discussion.
• Senior executives spend 53% of their time in meetings, at an average rate of $320 per person hour.

Some Steps:-

1. Clarify The Meeting Objective

The team begins the meeting by ensuring that people understand and agree on what is to be accomplished. Objectives include both the content of the meeting and the specific process objectives, such as improving participation, gathering initial ideas and listening to others.

2. Review Roles of Participants

Confirms who will be taking on specific roles for the meeting and what their roles will be. These can include: leader, team members, recorder, timekeeper, and facilitator.

3. Review the Agenda

Each agenda item includes the methods (e.g., brainstorming, mind mapping, cause and effect tools, fishbone diagrams, system thinking, roadblock analysis process, etc.) to be used for that item as well as the amount of time to be devoted to each.

4. Work Through Agenda Items

There may be one or several items for a particular meeting. The team works through them in an organized manner, using the methods and the time frame decided upon in step 3 above.

5. Review the Meeting Record

Team members should review information recorded on flipcharts during the meeting to refresh their memories about what has occurred in previous meetings along with what has been decided. The team should check for corrections or additions to these meeting records and decide what information needs to be kept in the team's permanent transcript. In many organizations, these are included in formal knowledge management databases and archives. Try to add to the Learning Organization focus, if applicable.

6. Next Steps and Next Meeting Agenda.

By the end of the meeting, the group should discuss what needs to be done based on the results of this meeting and the start of the next. Often, there are multiple steps and tasks needing followup or planning. Agree on the work that needs to be done next in order to advance. Clarify if necessary and complete the transcription of the goals, summarizing commitments.

7. Evaluate the Meeting

Team members should take a few minutes to discuss:

* What went well that we should continue doing?

* How could we improve the next meeting?

Meetings are part of the improvement and communications process. They should be tied to long-term learning objectives and organizational development initiatives. They can serve many useful purposes (but sometimes do not!).

A new way of serving our clients

At OTS Management we are constantly looking at new ways to provide services. The culture we encourage is one where we are not embarrassed at making mistakes, where we take them as learning experiences, and where we are not embarrassed at making an apology as long as we have a new and better way to service our clients.

In completing the 2007/2008 year we realsied that we were faced with something that many industries will face for the foreseeable future - a shortage of human resources at the right times and at the right levels of experience. We realised we had to compensate for this and for some time now our hiring policies have been based on three questions we ask ourselves at staff interviews:-

• Can they do the job?
• Will they do the job?
• Will they do it here?

The third question is the hardest to answer at interview and yet it is the most important because while you can train someone you cannot make them "fit in" and fitting in, we think, is the key to providing the best service for our clients, because then, all our staff will believe in the culture of giving our clients what we would want given to us.

While we are very satisfied with our staff this year in both ability and service culture, nevertheless our human resources are finite resources with a finite number of working hours. We have calculated our "capacity" and have planned to use it effectively next year.

The next issue we found in our review of the year was that the efficiency of our work suffered when we started a job and then had to put it down due to missing information. This would lead to a lengthy series of delays as we stopped, requested more information, restarted, then got stuck and requested more information, In between if the information took time to get to us it caused more delays. As we restarted jobs we would also have to take time to "get up to speed" again, remembering the points in our work processes we had completedhalf-completed, and not quite got there. This meant delays in getting the work back to clients as well as increased costs.

Finally we also found an issue where clients brought in their books only when the deadlines were approaching. This meant, very simply, bottlenecks. While we deal with our clients on a one-to-one basis, it appears (and we want it to be true) that for that time, they are our only concern. However this is patently not true if 30 clients bring their books in at the same time each expecting then at the end of the week - when we only have man-hours to do 10 sets of books in a week!

Imagine a factory-line that can manufacture 100 cars a month at full capacity. If the car salesyards have done a great job and obtained 200 orders that month, some people will have to wait!

Putting all three aspects together we have come up with a new way of serving our clients.

Firstly, having identified our monthly capacity, we shall be making requests of clients to bring in their expected work at certain times of the year, thus matching the "orders" to our capacity. In this way we can work on your affairs efficiently and exclusively during the nominated period. If on the other hand, an individual client may not be able to meet our timed capacity, or if they need the work for a different deadline, we shall try our hardest to reschedule to meet their needs. In order to cater for "emergencies" anmd urgent and unexpected jobs, we are scheduling our staff capacity to 75% and allowing 25% of the time to cater for these unpredictable tasks.

Naturally we need the teamwork and co-operation of our clients. If they bring in their work later than scheduled without letting us know there may well be delays in completing it.

Secondly when we write to clients to ask for their expected work at the stated times, we shall also be providing them with checklists for each of their entities. This will help remind them of what we need to do our jobs efficiently and effectively, avoiding the delays of the stop=start approach.

We believe this will be an improvement to our response times and will only improve with the years.

To us, it is always important to meet the needs of the client and if we have not been able to do so in the past we must look ahead to do so in the future.