Alvin Lai

Meetings are very much part of life for the average knowledge worker - be it a student doing a school project, a business leader managing a team or even a government leader debating policies with his ministers.

Sick of meetings?

How often do we find the meeting we chair disoriented, vague, draggy, downright boring and a total waste of time?

A project tight deadline coupled with a succession of ineffective meetings would only prove detrimental to both human relationships among team members and stress level.

While drafting this post, I realised that planning and having a successful meeting somewhat mirrors good project management techniques, so here's my take on the 6 points to an effect meeting!

What constitutes an effective meeting?

1. Meeting purpose - if you aren't even clear about why you are chairing this meeting in the first place, don't expect the mist to clear, ever. It is much easier to discuss a clear objective in mind.

2. Meeting preparation - ever went through 5 minutes into a meeting and realise that everyone forgot to bring a laptop with the project notes? Well I have, and it was a major source of distraction having to retrieve it, not to mention time wasting and morale busting.

3. Meeting agenda - sounds very much like a meeting purpose, but the agenda is a broken down list of, hopefully, small and addressable issues, which is light years way nicer to address than an amorphous blob of something.

4. Meeting action items - a meeting is not a meeting when everyone leaves it unsure of what to do thereafter. Clear and direct actionable items with deadlines assigned to team members not only allow for good project progress tracking, but also indirectly benefits the team members themselves as they are clearer of tasks expected of them, contributing to lower stress levels and better self esteem, knowing that they are needed, part of the team and effective.

5. Meeting reminder notes - a meeting's pretty much a waste of time if your team does not remember the salient points that were raised, right?

6. Meeting follow-up - successful meetings build up from successive meetings. Knowing when's the next agreed meeting at the end of a meeting cuts down co-ordination time. Since all/most project members are already present, it's actually much easier to agree on the next time to meet in person, rather than having a single person making phone calls to everyone later and struggle to make out the mish mash of timetable clashes.

I found a nice meeting organiser/planner template for all you templating folks, which can be downloaded here.

Credits to Studentlinc for this blog post's inspiration.