3 ways to transform your Meetings Culture into Action

Does your organisations have a poor meeting culture that slows progress?

A manager in a financial business told me recently she starts her work some days at 5.00 pm after being in back-to-back meetings all day. Another Senior Executive in a Fortune 100 company had just one hour in her entire week that wasn’t scheduled in a meeting. When people spend too much time in meetings, they get a lot of actions but don’t have the time to do them. People feel frustrated and stressed, and organisations get bogged down.

Many organisations suffer from a meetings culture and don’t know how to fix it.

So how can you move a meetings culture into an action culture? Let's look at 3 strategies that have helped others, from simple to more complex ideas.

1. Phoning ahead

This first step is to develop a practical habit called ‘Phoning Ahead.’ Before phones and email, you could only confirm details with someone face to face. Hence why meetings took place in the first instance. However, we seem to have continued those habits and not synchronised with current technology.

Make use of technology to advance ideas before a meeting. Imagine you’ve got a decision-making meeting late in the week with 6 other colleagues. You can maximise the productivity of the meeting by giving all 6 of them a 5-minute call to check in on their opinions and concerns. That’s a total of 1 hour; your half hour and their 5 mins each. Through this simple preparation, improved decision making is more likely. This initiative can either avoid a meeting in the first place or avoid a follow up meeting, which would save 6 hours of time; that’s 6 hours saved per hour invested.

With lots of free collaboration technology online, such as Doodle.com for polling, Surveymonkey.com, Google Docs or Dropbox.com, collaboration and advancement of ideas can happen outside of face to face time. What meeting do you have in the next 2 weeks where you could try Phoning Ahead or other collaboration tools to save time, advance ideas and make your meetings more productive?

2. Reduce Regular meetings

A second strategy to get your meetings culture moving is to Reduce Regular meetings, such as your weekly or monthly management of staff meetings. This can involve reducing the number, or reducing the topics to get more focussed. Regular meetings are like the garages of hoarders; overtime they can get filled with clutter and become unfocussed with more topics that take longer and slow down your organisation. So how do you Reduce Regular meetings to create more action? There are 3 steps:

Step 1:

List all the different purposes your Regular meetings fulfil. Be specific in this step, to ensure your reduction is most effective. Examples of purposes include; information sharing about progress, decisions about strategic matters, decisions about operational matters, introduction of new staff and the great catch all, ‘Other items’.

Step 2:

Review each purpose and decide on the optimal means of fulfilment. Meetings are an expensive resource as they tie up everyone’s time. Determine what purposes must be fulfilled in the meeting, and what purposes could be fulfilled through other less resource intensive ways. Then strip purposes and agenda items out of the meeting that can be accomplished by phone calls, working sessions between fewer people, collaborative online applications, brainstorming via an email chain or Skype chat.

Step 3:

Consider what the ideal cycle is for each of the different purposes that must still occur in your Regular meeting. Some items must be addressed more regularly, such as weekly operational decisions. Other items can have longer cycles, such as strategic decisions or project reviews. By deciding on the ideal cycle for each purpose, your Regular Meetings can end up with clearer focus.

For example, many management teams we work with end up distinguishing 2 different types of regular meetings. A weekly or fortnightly Operational Decision meeting, and then a monthly or quarterly Strategic Review meeting. Organisations who have done this note 2 things.

i. Their meetings focus on higher value items.

ii. When people know that the Regular Meeting is no longer a place to bring a pile of other issues, they get resolved more quickly through action.

Working through these 3 steps can take as little as 10 minutes on your own, or 20 – 30 minutes as a group. The investment will pay back 100 times over, as your Regular Meetings are Reduced to high quality, concentrated meetings that leverage the valuable time of everyone present. This structural change also drives behavioural change, towards a more focused and motivated team.

3. Go No Go

The 3rd strategy is ‘Go No Go’. This drives to the heart of ineffective decision making cultures and is not for the faint hearted. To make it work requires support from senior managers. A source of poor meetings cultures is the unwillingness for people to make decisions ,otherwise known as procrastination. Meetings can be used to look like things are being progressed, but indecision limits follow through action. ‘Go No Go’ strategy also has 3 steps.

Step 1:

Define clearly the decision to be made in meetings, and invite all key people required to make that decision.

Step 2:

‘Go’ to the meeting, and ensure the person authorised to make the decision shows up. In many organisations this is not always clear, particularly where Senior managers delegate decision making but then later overturn or change decisions. When a meeting is not attended by the authorised decision maker, a ‘No Go’ policy encourages people to call the meeting off. This can be a brave step and is why senior management support is vital for this strategy to work.

Step 3:

Follow up regardless of whether the outcome was Go or No Go. If the meeting was a No Go, the follow up is even more vital. Communication with the Decision maker about why the meeting was called off will lead to crucial conversations about roles, delegation and accountabilities. These conversations will drive to the heart of the poor decision making culture.

The Go No Go strategy brings undiscussed behaviour patterns to the surface and this creates more awareness particularly amongst senior managers about how they contribute to poor decision making and opportunities for improvement. It provides an opportunity to clarify roles and responsibilities and delegation authorities, leading to a more focused working environment.

Of the 3 leverage points for moving a meetings culture to an action culture, this one is the most complex and requires courage and openness. Therefore, if you wish to try it, it’s important that you get buy-in from others and communicate the strategy to people ahead of time. You may also suggest a trial period, such as 1 – 3 months, so that it is used as a symbolic device for change.

The 3 strategies above can all be adopted as ways of busting up your meetings culture and getting your organisation into action. This can be supported through FAST Meetings Co. training and coaching solutions that equip people with practical approaches to create more value from every meeting so that people feel engaged and productive, and organisations can implement their priorities faster.

by David Pointon FAST Meeting Co