Using Meetings Effectively

One of the key items to keep your day productive is to control the way meetings control your day. When you work in a large organization, invariably you get invite to a large number of meetings, in some of which you don't even contribute much. The key to effectively managing your time is to decide how to handle each of these types of meetings.

Meetings that you setup

The meeting that you setup is the one that you can control the most. Be conscious of your team and other people's time. Do not set up a meeting unless it is absolutely necessary to drive progress.

Meetings to track progress

When you set up a meeting:

  1. Do the homework to define the agenda clearly.

  2. Wherever possible, call out from each participant what is expected from them during the meeting.

  3. Take notes and agree upon action items during the meeting and document in a shared page. This saves you a lot of time for having to send meeting notes after the call. This also helps to make the meeting a working meeting

Meetings to report status

Again the key here is to prepare well:

  1. Know your audience: Make sure you know who all will be attending. This will give you a sense of what types of questions you can expect. Prepare the content according to the audience.

  2. Expect questions: Expect that you will get a number of questions. Having an FAQ as part of the addendum is a good way to summarize some of the commonly asked questions that you can leave for an offline read. If you know the audience upfront, you can anticipate and have the answers ready.

  3. Keep it short and simple: Keep the content of your presentation short and easy to understand for everyone. Take out long texts and keep only the information that you need to convey. The more information you present that is not related to the topic, the more chaos and confusion in the meeting.

Contributing effectively to other people's meetings

If you are attending any meeting, ask yourself the question: 'Why am I attending this meeting?' Make sure you are the one who can contribute the best from your team. If not, nominate someone else from your team.

When you are in the meeting that you decided to be a part of, make sure you know what your role is. If you know what questions are going to be asked from you, have crisp answers ready and preferably send it to the host upfront so that the host can focus the time on the rest of the items.

Adapt best practices that works for the organization

Every organization has its own rhythm of working. So the same strategies may not work everywhere. Observe what is working well in your organization. Adapt the best practices and communicate throughout the organization.