Guest Post: Jose Leon Liu

Jose is one of Chris' Fall 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about real-world meetings.

Another meeting? Really?
Jason Fried and David Hansson, founders of 37Signals, created the web application framework Ruby on Rails, which literally changed the web. The two young entrepreneurs shared many tips on how to be productive in the work environment in their book Reworki. “There's nothing more toxic to productivity than a meeting” and “Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead” are some of the thoughts that they have for meetings. Meetings can easily become a waste of time by going off focus. Not to mention meetings convened without a focus, or at least an important one for all attendees. Not only do meetings consume time, but also “break your work day into smaller pieces that disrupt your natural workflow” as stated in Rework. Without proper follow up, meetings can be merely a conversation without any future action or follow up. Interestingly, some of the best tips on how to have productive meetings take place before and after the meeting.

First of all, have a clear agenda of the meeting. Agendas help the members of the meeting to be informed and prepared for the topics that will be discussed. The agenda should contain a list of topics that will be discussed. For each topic, a maximum amount of time should be set. Also, each topic should have a moderator in charge of managing the conversation or presenting some sort of information. The moderator has to carefully avoid the conversation going off topic. Even if new issues emerge, they should be briefly discussed or postponed. Invite as few people as possible. Someone not involved in the topics to be discussed will not only lose his time, but also make everyone else lose their time by asking irrelevant questions or talking nonsense. All members of the meeting should receive the agenda in advance.

The meeting should not end without a plan of action or a matrix of responsibilities. If no one takes action of what was discussed in a meeting, then all the members just lost their time chatting. It is always good to have a memorandum of the meeting. Unresolved topics that still need another meeting should be scheduled before the meeting is over.

A good example of efficient meeting management is Scrum, a project management framework. Scrum holds daily scrum meetingsii. The meetings are so brief (usually less than 5 minutes and, by rule, no more than 15 minutes) that everyone should be standing. In the scrum meeting, each member mentions his latest achievements, his work plan for the day and finally any problems that prevent him from reaching his goal.

Meetings can really be unproductive and before convening one, think twice about wasting the valuable time of the attendees. Distributing an agenda will help ensure all attendees come prepared for the meeting. Following the agenda will aid in keeping the focus of the current topic, thus maximizing the productivity of all attendees. At the meetings end, the moderator should summarize the plan of action and all attendees should receive a memorandum.

References: Fried, J and Hansson, D. Rework. 2010., Mountain Goat Software. The Daily Scrum Meeting.