Meeting Best Practices Template

As seen in the article “Make Meetings Less Dreaded”
HR Magazine (January 2007) by Stuart R. Levine

Use the following meeting best practices to begin developing your own internal meeting performance standards. Review them with team members and colleagues. Working together, delete those that do not make sense in your environment, keep those that do, and add new ones you feel will add value. Then circulate the list and hold everyone accountable to them, including yourself.

BEFORE ANYONE CONVENES

Define your purpose : Without clarity about what you're trying to achieve there is no way to achieve it effectively. Once that's defined you can answer several key questions: Do I really need a meeting? Who really needs to be there? What information will they need in advance to accomplish what I'm asking them to? How long will it take? In the absence of a clear purpose, you're just guessing on these key questions and the odds of your wasting resources shoots up.

Create an agenda: This one sounds so simple, but I find that it's overlooked a stunning percentage of the time, even with senior people. Always create an agenda to focus the conversation on your purpose and always begin the agenda with a clear purpose statement. It's the first step in holding everyone involved accountable for achieving it.

Meet only when necessary: Ask yourself honestly, do you really have to meet or are you getting people together because it's the only way to get them to review your documents? Unnecessary meetings are a phenomenal waste.

Meet only for as long as necessary: Not every meeting needs to take 30 minutes or more. Often habit makes us ask for more time than we need. If you only need ten minutes, only ask for ten. Then be super prepared and keep people laser focused on the purpose. The less time you allow, the less likely people are to ramble away from the objective because participants know they literally don't have the time for it. Conversely, if you leave plenty of time, it always ends up getting used and not always productively.

Involve only the people necessary: Having people in your meetings is a luxury because their time is precious to the company and to their families. Invite carefully. (Pretend you're paying for their time — in a sense, you are.)

Prepare and give participants the time and materials to do the same: If you're holding the meeting, distribute the agenda at least 24 hours in advance; 72 if you need colleagues to review documents before the meeting. If you're invited to attend a meeting, always schedule time to review the advance materials. It's simply your job. It also has the added bonus of validating that your presence is necessary. If it's not clear to you why you've been asked to a meeting, ask. A simple email saying “I'm not sure what value I'll add in this meeting; what did you have in mind when you put me on the list?” will do the job.

IN THE ROOM

Start and end on time. No matter how many people are in the room, shut the door when the meeting is scheduled to start. Always end on time unless you've asked for permission to run over and everyone in the room has agreed. You will get a reputation as someone who starts on time and people begin to come on time to your meetings. More importantly, waiting for late comers is the practical equivalent of saying to those who came on time, “Their time is more valuable than yours.” Everybody had a poster or screensaver these days touting their company's commitment to respectful behavior. Starting and ending meetings on time is one way to walk the talk.

If there's no agenda, ask for one. One CEO I worked with refused to participate in any meeting without an agenda and told his team to do the same. That company experienced real change that improved meetings and, in fact, strengthened their entire culture. Of course, you have to be CEO to set that kind of policy. But wherever you sit in an organization you, if you attend a meeting with no agenda on the table, you can say, “I'd like to have a sense of what we're here to accomplish and sketch out a quick agenda.” Your time has value and you have every right to demand it's well used.

Get to the point: If it's your meeting, begin by stating your purpose and then stay focused on it. If you've been invited, link every comment you make back to the meeting's objective. If you've been asked to present, make sure your presentation is only as long as is absolutely necessary. As a general rule, you lose your audience after six slides, so try to stick to six and make them count.

Keep things on course: The chair is primarily responsible for this, but everyone in the room is free to respectfully comment if they believe a discussion is off course and request that an “out-of-scope” conversation be taken off line.

Define roles: Each meeting should have a chairperson who runs the meeting and a recorder who takes notes, captures action items on a separate page, and monitors time. The chairperson keeps conversations from running on and the recorder will keep the meeting from running over. Define these roles at the beginning of the meeting so everyone knows what to expect.

Foster conversation. Ask other people what they think and listen. Invite input from the people who've said the least. They've been listening the most, so their insights may be significant.

When you're in violent agreement, move on. Don't give in to the temptation of discussing how much you agree and sharing war stories about how right you are. When you say, “I think we're in violent agreement” it should be a signal to everyone that you're moving on.

Wrap with action steps and commitments. At the close of the meeting, define next steps. Then determine who will own each and by when they can deliver. When setting deadlines, ask, “Can you commit to that?” People are much more likely to follow through when they've given their commitment. Ask the recorder to review any action steps that came up during the meeting and seek owners and commitments for those as well.

FOLLOW THROUGH

Send meeting notes within 24 hours. The scribe should send the meeting notes within 24 hours, no matter what. At a minimum, they should capture the actions steps defined by the group, who is accountable, and deadlines agreed to. This is a key step in bridging the discussion from the meeting room back into business operations — it is critical to getting real impact.

Facilitate follow through to ensure results.

As each deadline approaches, the chair or person who called the meeting should send an email to that task's owner reminding him or her of the deadline and offering help or assistance to meet it. As participants deliver on their commitments, send a note thanking them for following through and copy everyone who attended the meeting.