Time Management Courses and Meetings

On a recent time management course the tutor mentioned that ‘meetings are where minutes are taken and hours are wasted’ how true this can be!

Meetings are an essential communication tool that most companies carry out with a lot of frequency, in fact many companies end up having meetings about meetings. It does not have to be like this, if meetings are managed correctly then they can be an extremely effective form of communication, but so many managers get it so wrong time and time again.

If managers and staff followed the simple rules of managing meetings so much time would be saved for people to get back to their own productive tasks. We all know that the first rule of calling a meeting is that there must be a clear purpose for the meeting. In fact if you cannot write down the purpose of the meeting in one sentence then the purpose is not clear enough.

Know on time management courses people get fed up listening to tutors talking about the importance of objectives and having clearly defined goals. Well a meeting is no different, a purpose is no use unless you know what you want to achieve from the meeting, and so the second step is to have clear goals.

The next step is to consider other peoples time so therefore you should only invite people to the meeting who really need to be there. You should also consider do they really need to be there for the whole meeting or can they just come in to the meeting for the areas that are relevant to them.

Next comes the agenda and although most chair people have an agenda very few of them actually put a time limit on each agenda item. I remember working with a time management training guru a number of years ago and he said the best thing a chairperson can do before the meeting is to nominate some one in the meeting as a timekeeper for each agenda item and then also appoint some one else the role of keeping everyone on track for each agenda item. In other words give some one the responsibility to bring it to the groups attention if they feel the meeting is going off track.

On many time management training courses the tutor will talk about SOT/FOT which stands for ‘start on time/finish on time’ Next comes the minutes of the meeting, I have to say I hate the name minutes and would always refer minutes to be referred to as action points. Each action should be clear specific and measurable and there should be an agreed penalty for those who do not complete their actions.

As some one said to me once on a time management training course, a meeting with no action points is only a conversation.

Frank O'Toole, Premier Training Courses