Meetings cost a fortune to companies. Direct costs (salaries of everyone attending the meetings) but the highest, most painful, cost is the cost of opportunity! When people attend meetings, they are not working on their top priorities.
So meetings should be taken very seriously.
There are very basic rules for a meeting to be productive:
- Meetings should have a clear agenda and this agenda should be shared several days BEFORE the meeting. The subject of the meeting should clearly mention its goal.
- The supporting documents should be shared several days BEFORE the meeting to give enough time to everyone to read it.
- Everyone should have read the document BEFORE the meeting.
- We should not read / present the document during the meeting, the goal of the meeting is to DISCUSS it. We do not need to be all in a room to read the document, this is not a book club.
- In case not everyone was able to read the document, then the meeting needs to be rescheduled. We cannot have 1 person waste the time of everyone else.
AND FINALLY THE GOLDEN RULE: a meeting needs to have meeting minutes with clear actions / decisions. Those minutes need to be reviewed and used long after the meeting took place. The minutes are the most valuable output of the meeting. If there were no minutes, it means the meeting should not have taken place and we have wasted our time (and money).
The few tips above are not best practice, they should be mandatory.
Ferrandou 