Cancel unproductive meetings!
August 29, 2012|Employers, Tips At work| No comments yet
Whether you are very secure in your job or you are brushing up your resume for its next adventure in the world, you know that you want to be seen as efficient. We all see efficiency as being an important end goal for any business venture, but sometimes, we have to watch helplessly as any hope for timeliness and good progress goes up in smoke. One of the biggest enemies of efficiency is the unnecessary meeting. How can you kill this monster in your midst?
First, weed out meetings that are just rehashes of something that most of the people know. It is tempting to call everyone in for a review of a certain policy, particularly if there are new people on board, but the truth is that if most of the people know the information, the meeting is worthless for them. Use memos and private one-on-one meetings to get everyone up to code. The fewer times people have to hear information that they already know, the better off they are.
Assign someone to keep the meeting on task. The problem with meeting is that they derail so very easily. Someone brings up a salient point, someone else counters with something that is only partially related, and a third person springs off of that point into a completely different direction. Make sure that each meeting has a person who is assigned to keep the people on task. This person should not be shy about saying that a subject is off-topic. This may be a human resources employee, or it might be someone who is simply given the task.
Limit the meeting times. A long meeting, particularly one that is poorly planned, can stretch on and on. Think about the last time that you sat in a two-hour meeting and ask yourself if you got anything done. The truth of the matter is that the longer a meeting is, the more likely it is that its value is dropping. A fast meeting is an efficient one. If your meeting is relatively small, keep the time limit down to something like half an hour. A larger meeting might be forty-five minutes or an hour, but it should not be any longer. If you keep the meeting short, everyone will have one eye on the clock, and things will get discussed with a great deal more rapidity.
Read off the goals for the meeting. What is the point of the meeting for the people assembled? Do they have to make a decision? Do they have to be informed of a policy change? These are the biggest goals of most meetings, and you will find that if these are not the point that the meeting should be reconsidered. Once you understand what the meeting is about, make sure that you announce it at the beginning. This gets everyone focused, and it also pulls people together.
When you are building a resume, the last thing that you want to do is to look inefficient. Practice your abilities of management and efficiency by killing those non-productive meetings.
