Guest Post: Sharat Sannabhadti

Sharat is one of Chris' Summer 2010 Professional Speaking students. Here he writes about real-world meetings.

‘Meetings are a waste of time’. This is a common sentiment observed by all people across different organizations all over the world! In fact, it is so popular that there was a Dilbert comic strip on this topic.

PHB (Dilbert’s Boss): Let’s figure out a timeline for deployment.
Dilbert: Ted is the only one who knows about that and he is on vacation.
PHB: let’s see how far we can get without Ted.
Alice: You mean without knowledge or insight?
PHB: We can make reasonable assumptions.
Dilbert: Or we could wait for Ted to come back tomorrow and ask him.
PHB (shouts): I CALLED THIS MEETING AND IT’S NOT A MEETING UNTIL SOMEONE’S TIME GETS WASTED!!
Dilbert: I apologize for my efficiency.
PHB: Apology accepted.
(Source: Dilbert Comic Strip, Nov 23, 2008)

What causes meetings to be time-wasting sessions? During my 4 years in the corporate world, I have been to a number of meetings. I have observed a few major reasons that cause meetings to become synonymous with time-wasting sessions. Most of the meetings fail because the agenda for the meeting is not established in detail and is not communicated to every participant of the meeting. In other cases, the person conducting the meeting lacks a sense of time and lets the conversations or behavior deviate from the main topic of the meeting. Other times, the people participating in the meeting are not prepared to provide valuable input. So, are meetings always a waste of time? Are we all going to waste 10% of our entire lives attending meetings? Well, hopefully not. There are some steps that good meeting conductors take to ensure that meetings are useful to every participant. They are as follows:

1. Purpose: There should be a clear purpose for conducting a meeting. One has to be clear that the situation needs a meeting to be conducted and no other means of communication such as email can be used as an alternative.

2. Agenda: The agenda for the meeting should be very specific and should be shared with everyone attending the meeting. It should be detailed, providing details about the duration of the meeting, the person responsible for noting down minutes of the meeting, who is going to lead the meeting, etc.

3. Number of people: There should not be more than 10 users ideally. Having many users in the meeting will lead to a lot of effort being spent managing the people, defeating the main purpose of the meeting.

4. Time: The meeting should be at a convenient time in the week so that all the concerned people can participate in the meeting.

5. Duration: The meeting should be planned for a specific duration so that the time is used efficiently during the meeting. Ideally a meeting should not be conducted for more than 2 hours. A person, preferably the meeting conductor, should be responsible for keeping track of time during the meeting.

6. Place: The venue for the meeting should be convenient (preferably a central place) so that it becomes easier for the people to reach the place.

7. Participation: All the concerned people (stakeholders) must be invited to the meeting. The meeting conductor should make sure that every participant gets a chance to contribute. The meeting conductor should act as a facilitator. His role is to guide the discussion by asking questions and taking input from everyone. In the end he is supposed to summarize the points discussed.

8. Action/Result: Every meeting should end with clearly defined action points, the people responsible for each of the points, and the timeline associated with these points. Without a definite result or a clearly defined future action plan, the meeting is a waste of time for everyone involved.

So let us all take an oath today that we will follow the above rules and educate others in becoming good meeting conductors. Let us make our world a better place by turning meetings into ‘time-saving’ sessions!!