Meetings: Tool for Managing Benefit Realization and Stakeholder Engagements

Every organization uses the meeting as a tool to accomplish many things. This concept of a meeting has become so mundane in today's business context. Whether we are leading a project, designing a product, coordinating a program, or supporting the operations, there are meetings galore on everyone's calendar! Meetings exist to collect & share information, review progress and risks to delivery, updates to management or team such as kill gates, management checkpoints, or health check reviews, manage changes to the projects or programs or problem-solve a technical or management challenge among many other reasons to have a meeting.

However, when you ask the question of how effective the meetings are in accomplishing the outcome the meetings are supposed to address, there is a wide spectrum of comments and objections one can hear! How often is the organization or even a project using the meeting as a stakeholder engagement tool? 

There are several books, blog articles, and training guides on conducting effective meetings. Then, why are some organizations advocating against meeting free days (hickey, n.d.) or email free days?  Synthesizing major recommendations of many of these recommendations come down to three things: 1) have an agenda, 2) involve the right people, and 3) have an effective facilitator. Let us look at these principles a little closely.

The first recommendation espoused was the golden principle of having an agenda to begin the meeting. This recommendation emphasized the focus on the purpose of the meeting.  I am sure some of us can relate to not attending any meeting without an agenda. However, despite having a written agenda published several days back, how conclusively we can agree that all these effective meetings had an agenda and so were efficient? The fundamental root cause is that productivity is associated with outcomes. A mere attendance at the meetings or raising a viewpoint doesn't accomplish anything except burn people's time! The goal of every meeting is to have clear outcomes that advance towards the benefits to be realized for the benefit of the project, team or organizational objectives. This means there should be decision points agreed on and actions items articulated with a clear accountable and responsible owner and with a definitive timeline to provide an incremental update on the action items! Meetings are an effective source of productivity loss (Rajagopalan, 2014a) if there is no laser focus on outcome management.

The second recommendation we listed involved the right people! In a world that appreciates "less is more", is involving too many people in a meeting appropriate use of people's time especially if the meeting's purpose is not to disseminate information (multicast)? A successful meeting is the one that has carefully identified the right parties with the decision authority to advance completion of the agenda/objectives towards an outcome or take accountability to follow up with an action item to close (Rajagopalan, 2016). Meetings are also an effective stakeholder engagement tool because unengaged or non-participating members are also contributing to the cost of a meeting (Rajagopalan, 2014b)! These members can be released from the meeting completely or early on so that they can be productive in what they do the best! Not managing this rightful audience and measuring the contribution effectiveness of the delegates in a meeting is a leadership failure on the organizer/facilitator of the meeting.

The third challenge we noted was having a good facilitator! Especially in meetings where participation from meeting attendees is required, this facilitation is critical. While we need to allow innovation, creativity, and problem-solving to continue, we also need to make sure that we allow tangential discussions and gut-feel thoughts that derail the meeting. Depending upon the value of such ideas, the organizer may have to put this parking lot, or delegate or seek the support of a leader with the decision authority to address that right away. Having another person to be a scribe (meeting notes taker) or a scheduler to keep up with the time is also an important element of facilitation, particularly considering today's virtual meetings where the facilitator may be presenting on the screen and can't have the luxury of taking notes! Not having a timebox to ensure that outcomes are identified, or action items are listed is a disservice to the other members who are attending the meeting.

So, next time you call for a meeting or organize a meeting, think what outcomes the meeting should accomplish, what attendees with the right decision authority are present, how much are the meeting attendees able to delegate their work, and how you will facilitate the meeting to ensure that action item are identified to advance every meeting incrementally and iteratively towards realizing the benefits for the organization. 

References

Hickey, K.F. (n.d.) How to take back your productivity with no meeting Wednesday. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from https://wavelength.asana.com/workstyle-no-meeting-wednesdays/

Rajagopalan, S. (2014a). Enhancing productivity. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from http://agilesriram.blogspot.com/2014/03/enhacing-productivity.html

Rajagopalan, S. (2014b). Effective virtual meetings. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from http://agilesriram.blogspot.com/2014/05/effective-virtual-meetings.html

Rajagopalan, S. (2016). Agile or Traditional: Productivity management still has basic roots. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from http://agilesriram.blogspot.com/2016/06/agile-or-traditional-productivity.html

Effective Virtual Meetings

Today's project environments face a unique challenge in holding effective meetings that contain team members physically absent due to geographic limitations spanning multiple time zones. Let us peel the layers of effective meetings.

First, it is critical to understand the cost of meetings. Meetings are one of the easiest means to erode profit margins and consume productive hours ineffectively if used inaccurately. For instance, putting 8 people in a room for 1 hour for a project status meeting would mean 8 hours or 1 productive day of a full-time employee is quickly consumed. When the idea of project management evolved in the corporate world a few decades back, more people were inexperienced working in project environments justifying the need for project meetings. But with the evolution of project management, removal of hierarchical decision-making layers with flatter organizations, sophistication of many tools in today's world question project managers calling for unnecessary meetings. This is an indication of several causes not limited to the project management inefficiency, lack of knowledge dissemination, and communication bottlenecks.

The practices of management by walking around (MBWA) have been known for a long time where key decision managers such as the project manager shouldn't be confining themselves to cubicles or office spaces but walk around to get the updates and remove the impediments faster. The agile approaches take this planning a couple of steps higher where the daily standup meeting is used to plan for corrective actions for the coach. So, use meetings effectively and call for meetings only with members as required. Don't call for a meeting because you don't know the answer and want to show control by bringing many to the table to get the answers to avoid project derailment.

Second, now that we have addressed quickly to eliminate unnecessary meetings, let us look at distributed team members that lack non-verbal clues.  These meetings further go beyond an actionable agenda with enough time for team members to review any required information to be prepared for the meeting.  Some norms need to exist to understand time and culture boundaries.  People may take the calls from vehicles and home, irregular hours for some participants, etc. So, muting phones unless talking, ensuring technology clashes such as not using computer microphones creating background echoes, avoiding too many parameters like conference id, password, audio key, etc. besides dialing into the bridge making it difficult for people to take the call from moving vehicles, understanding constraints with the number of ports available for group meeting, and differentiating webinar versus group meetings where one person alone can talk versus many can talk at the same time are all some examples of additional meeting etiquettes.

These supplement the known order in which people introduce themselves. For instance, people can name the next person to talk, share input, or introduce.

Third, in these meetings, it is equally important to avoid the pretense of multitasking. While it is a good idea to request to repeat or paraphrase questions and is perfectly understandable in a multicultural team membership, it is not an excuse for not focusing during the meeting.

Fourth, a project manager should really understand the purpose of the meeting.  An agenda is only good if we stick to it. While we don't need to go with the same order as the agenda, it is critical to ensure we don't go on a tangent moving away from the meeting's purpose.

Finally, a meeting without the meeting minutes documenting the decisions made to avoid further meetings or actions identified on who should do what by when question the productivity of such meetings. A project manager in these cases should become a good facilitator, leader, and coach to keep the meeting in focus, document notes, and coach the team towards effective meetings.

So, meet effectively and only when required. Wouldn't you agree?