From the time humans first got together to accomplish a task that couldn’t be done alone there have been meetings—and probably complaints about them.

In more modern times, meetings have been satirized in the likes of Dagwood and Dilbert and given rise to dozens, if not hundreds, of books with detailed information on making meetings successful, yet people still loathe them.

“Meetings take up about 40 percent of employee time, according to the National Statistics Council. And that time may not be well spent. In a series of MCI Conferencing studies, 90 percent of those surveyed admitted daydreaming during a meeting and 40 percent admitted falling asleep.”

Before you jump on the detailed mechanical fixes (solid agendas, controlling meeting bullies, etc.) available, you need to check your own meeting MAP.

• First, be sure that you’re not part (or all) of the problem, and
• second, perform any MAP adjustments needed to implement successfully the meeting expertise available to you in all those books.

To do the first, ask one or two people you’re sure will be honest with you to evaluate your meeting skills and behavior and, even if you’re not sure that they’re correct, try adjusting your actions and see if there’s improvement. If there is, then you’ve already accomplished the second, if not, try something different.

Give it a month or two for the changes to sink in (don’t announce them) and then ask your group to anonymously evaluate you and each other in light of improving meeting success—the anonymity yields more candid responses than an open discussion.

Correlate the responses and then discuss them privately with each person. Share with them that you already did this on a smaller scale and are planning to do it again based on the new feedback. Lead them through the same process that you went through, so they understand that making changes in how they think makes changing their actions much easier.

Do the evaluations again in six months, then repeat at least once a year, more often if necessary.

Even if meetings are still considered a necessary evil, at least they’ll be a productive and relatively painless one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 11:49 am and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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