Making the Most of Staff Meetings

By Mark Fulton

There I was. Bathed in the unrelenting cold white light and sterile silence of the meeting room. I sat alone at a huge, utilitarian conference table in a chair designed to torture the spine and stretch the office-furniture budget. The first to arrive for the staff meeting, I cursed my punctuality.

A framed motivational poster on the wall caught my attention. It depicted a verdant forest with a bald eagle soaring high above a serene mountain lake. The word “Excellence was emblazoned in bold letters at the bottom. I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined myself running like Hawkeye along the rim of a dazzling canyon at sunset, the scent of pine and the soft whisper of a distant waterfall filling my senses. Then everyone else arrived and the meeting started.

An hour later, the dazed expressions on the faces of my meeting-table companions confirmed my worst fears. For the second time that week, I was trapped in that barren wasteland — that vacuous corporate Twilight Zone where time stands still — the meaningless, meandering, mind-numbing business meeting.

Have you been there? Even worse, have you been the perpetrator of one of these crimes against your colleagues? If so, shame on you. You should be lashed to a La-Z-Boy and forced to watch six hours of C-SPAN.

Meetings are an inescapable fact of life in today’s business world. Until someone perfects mass telepathy, we are destined to spend hours — and sometimes days — sitting in a circle, trying to figure out how to keep the corporate campfire burning.

Meetings provide a venue at which we plan initiatives, make decisions, share information, solve problems and evaluate progress. Thanks to modern technology, we can even meet via computers and teleconferencing with people who in earlier days were spared meeting attendance.

However, the fact that some meetings must take place does not excuse the manner in which many of them are conducted.

“Ineffective meeting management is fast becoming a national disgrace,” say Robert K. Mosvick and Robert B. Nelson in their book, We’ve Got to Start Meeting Like This. “Poorly planned and poorly run meetings are the worst-kept secret of America’s vaunted business skills.”

Citing a survey conducted by Hofstra University, the authors claim that unproductive time spent in poorly run meetings translates to a loss of nearly $60 billion for American businesses. Unfortunately, the growing trend of more and longer meetings promises to raise that figure even higher.

Fixing the problems with today’s business meetings requires a broader discussion of meeting dynamics than the space for this column allows. However, here are a few basic techniques that you, as a meeting leader, can employ to make your powwow more productive:

• Streamline attendance. Who has to be there? Invite only those participants who will definitely contribute something to the meeting objective. Ask others who aren’t essential to be on call in case their input is needed. Some participants may only be needed for a portion of the meeting. Give them a specific time to join the group.
• Lock the door. When the appointed time to begin the meeting has arrived, lock the door. Latecomers, who are disruptive and slow things down, will have to knock to get in. Don’t recap for latecomers.
• Have a written agenda. List the objectives that the meeting is intended to achieve and the points that will be addressed during the meeting. Break the meeting into segments, assign a portion of time to each and set a time when the meeting will end. Whenever possible, send the agenda to participants in advance. Stick to the agenda.
• Set a positive tone. Warm up the meeting by beginning with a piece of upbeat news, a compliment from a customer or a moment of recognition for a participant.
• Designate a notetaker. Ask someone you know is organized and thorough to record the proceedings. Designating a notetaker frees everyone else to listen rather than write (and possibly miss something important). It also gives everyone the same summary of meeting contents.
• End with an action plan. The final minutes of a meeting should be spent summarizing the meeting’s content and determining a list of actions that should result from the meeting.

When I first became self-employed, I made a vow to myself that I would never sit through another pointless, boring, time-wasting meeting. Of course, I soon realized that being the master of your destiny doesn’t mean you won’t occasionally bend to the will of others — especially if you want to eat.

Nevertheless, most of my meetings are now of my own making, which at the very least keeps me from staring at the walls for too long.


© Copyright 1999 Mark S. Fulton