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Efficient Meetings = More Time - Keeping meetings on task and on topic can save you over one full month every year

Saturday, February 10, 2007 - by Hannon Brett

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How many meetings did you attend or hold in 2006? Did you discuss and collaborate on training curriculum in those meetings? Now take a minute to consider how many of those meetings actually resulted into positive, productive action that made your business and training programs better.

These are important questions to ask in this world of fast-food communication, where on-demand, real-time, dynamic collaboration technologies have quickly turned global business into a single, connected cube farm. Everyone has meetings; it's up to you to determine whether the information and responsibilities shared in those meetings drive your success or simply lead to deeper inefficiencies. The Wharton Center for Applied Research found that:

if managers use meetings appropriately they can reduce the time spent in meetings by 25 percent. Effective management of remaining meetings can reduce time spent in meetings by an additional 20 percent. This indicates that using meetings effectively results in a reduction of time spent in meetings from an average of 17 hours per week to 10 hours per week.

Those are some pretty amazing numbers to think over. If you can become better at using and managing your meetings, you can save about five hours per week. That's 260 hours per year or an astonishing 32.5, eight-hour working days each year. What could you accomplish with over an extra month every year?

Take Back Your Time

It's great that Wharton can come up with statistics, but how do you actually bring these projections to bear? There are actions that you can take today that will begin saving you that coveted five or seven hours per week. And following some basic guidelines will ensure that your meetings instantly become more productive and successful.

Pay attention to meeting preparation and scheduling. Influencing optimized meeting productivity throughout your entire meeting lifecycle starts with preparation. Before you even open your scheduling application, ask yourself whether a meeting is the most efficient way to accomplish your goal. Is a meeting the proper medium, and if so, who are the right people needed directly drive productive action?

Once you've established that a meeting is the right way to go, you need to invite the right people, including

a meeting organizer (that's you)
subject matter experts
all cross-functional project stakeholders
the necessary decision makers.

Your next focus should be the utilization of proper meeting invitation protocol. Experts have noted that this is where meeting organizers waste 10 to 15 minutes, thus beginning meetings in an unproductive manner. While applications like Microsoft Outlook make scheduling easy, it's up to you to make your meeting invites work for you, not against you. A concise agenda will let invitees know what's expected of them and what will be covered. A meeting goal will help keep you on track and drive the expected outcome of your meetings. Finally, as we incorporate more technology into our meeting habits, people need to know how to join a web or audio conference before the meeting actually starts, so instructions are crucial, too.

Capture the right meeting information and action items. Now that you've utilized the proper methods to get the right participants into the right meeting with the right information, you should concentrate on correctly capturing meeting information. Most people I talk to use Microsoft Word, a text pad, or the body of an email. While these applications are easy and familiar, they don't provide any true meeting productivity capabilities. Their use can actually lead to loss of productivity, information, and meeting momentum.

Whatever you use, the most important factor is that you capture the necessary information in a manner that ensures proper consumption and utilization. Recording all of the right information in an easy-to-consume format will make it much more likely that your hard work in meetings will be used to create successful outcomes after meetings.

Distribute effective meeting information promptly. After capturing the information shared in your meeting, you must distribute it in an effective and timely manner. This seemingly simple action will have a dramatic impact on whether the meeting information is utilized or simply filed, forgotten, or even deleted. Your main goal should be to ensure that the proper people receive and can easily consume the right information. Timing is everything, so distribute your meeting summary as quickly after the meeting as possible, and do so in a format that is usable by all of your participants. Choosing a ubiquitous, non-proprietary technology format that is generally accepted, like ASCII text or HTML, will further guarantee that your meeting notes will lead to productive action.

Archive, track, and manage critical meeting information correctly. The final step to securing long-term meeting success is to make your historic information easily accessible. Distributed meeting summaries and action items should be archived in a way that provides immediate anytime access. This information should also be contextually linked, keeping together all information from each meeting as a single record. This includes notes, documents, action items, meeting details, and any other item used in the meeting.

Assigned action items usually end up becoming project drivers, so these nuggets must be managed with diligence. Tracking and managing action items will make your team much more productive and will ensure that your meeting outcomes lead to realized goals.

Pull it all together. Contrary to popular experience, meetings don't have to be a nuisance or a place to catch up on lost sleep. They can be the information and communication drivers behind your organization's training, learning, and performance programs. Empower yourself to much more effectively capture, distribute, archive, and manage the critical information and action items shared in meetings and your training projects will turn out to be more successful than planned. You'll optimize efficiency while saving you and your organization precious time and money. and maybe you can even find something productive (or even fun) to do with the extra time you'll save.