The Meeting Advantage

Welcome back to our final post of our 3-week BusinessCommunication Series.  In case you missed last two sessions, you can follow the links below to read them now:

Week1 - The Writing Advantage

Week 2 - The Presentation Advantage

Meetings are another common form for business communication.  Having effective meetings and ineffective meetings are like night and day.  Your employees will either be thankful you had them or they might fell frustrated like the group in the photo above.

There are primarily 4 types of meetings:

·         LIVE in-person

·         Telephonic

·         Web-based

·         Video

Today we are going to focus primarily on LIVE in-person meetings.  Below are a few tips to help you become successful.

·         Getting the right people involved - Identifying the right team members is crucial.  Wasting people’s time is actually costing the organization money!  Consider taking the average salary in your organization.  Then multiply that by the number of meetings you hold annually.  Lastly, take into consider the length of your average meeting.  Then, do the math! 

For example:  If you have 500 employees with an average salary of $50 per hour attending let’s say 150 hours of internal meetings a year, that costs the organization $3,750,000 in salary costs alone, not to mention productivity costs!  What if you could reduce that by 20% or more and use more company- wide memos or emails instead?  That could save you around $750K+!  Imagine what you could do with that extra cash! 

·         Begin with the End in Mind - Like a good document or presentation, you need to consider how the meeting helps you achieve your top business priorities.  You need to think about what you want people to know or do as a result of this meeting. 

·         Have an agenda, please. - This is a common theme of complaints that I hear from people when I ask what is their biggest pet peeve about meetings.  You would be surprised how many senior leaders use their authority to mandate a meeting, but have no clue as to why they are having it and neither do their employees.  You must have a few topics clearly defined, know who is going to be prepared to speak to them and try to have a timeline planned for that topic and then stick to it.  Otherwise, if you don’t people who were prepared to speak to their topic often don’t ever get to it, because of poor time management by the previous speakers in the meeting.  That is a double waste of time and it costs your organization money… twice (one for meeting time prep and another for their time in the meeting). 

·         Make a Decision! - After your meeting is about to conclude, decide what actions are going to be made based on the information shared.  Otherwise, once again, it might be another way to waste productivity and cash!

Today’s post was a high level overview to what participants learn in our MeetingAdvantage Program.  If you would like to arrange a day of training for this content for your leaders and managers, let’s talk!  If you run a Medium-Large organization with several layers of management, I’m positive that the ROI will be huge!

Enabling greatness, one organization at a time,

John Vakidis