Making Meetings Matter

My personal experience of the biggest time waster at work, however, isn't emails... it's meetings. Specifically it's meetings where information is to be either gathered or presented and which are (frankly!) a complete waste of time and air, as often as not! So what is it that means these things suck in our hours and give nothing back?

Well there are lots of things, but I'd like to draw your attention to just two of them at the moment. Firstly, people don't understand what presentations in meetings are for, and secondly, they don't put any time into them.

All the research I've read suggests that meetings/presentations are not an efficient way of getting hard facts over to people. If you want them to remember things like dates and pounds, you need to prepare a document in what a friend of mine calls "dead tree format" - simple, old-fashioned black ink on white paper. Presentations are, however, the best way to enthuse people and explain the facts and figures. The meeting/presentation shouldn't be to tell people the facts, it should be to talk about the impact and consequences of the facts - in other words, the stuff that involves passion and people!

The second point is one I have little sympathy with. On our training days I'm often told that people don't have time to put into practice the things we're training them in "in the real world". My response is that if you put only 20 minutes into preparing a presentation that lasts 40 minutes and which six people sit through, that's a fraction over an hour and a half of wasted staff time. On the other hand, putting an hour's time into preparing so that the meeting isn't wasted... well, the result is obvious.

So before you call - or even attend - your next business meeting, think about whether you're doing the right things with it... and if you're ready for it!