Energize your business meetings
We have all sat in those meetings where the discussion feels like it is going around in circles with no end in sight. There probably won’t be any decisions made and most staff will leave more annoyed than they were before. You can probably imagine the various actors in the room.
The speaker who leads the conversation. Sometimes with great excitement and sometimes with annoyance. There is at least one overly optimistic supervisor who wants to change the world. Few people can miss the “I stayed out too late” team member who is about to fall asleep.Then there are the bored and irritated team members ready to “get back to real work”.
These meetings continue to circle around, occurring weekly, monthly, or goodness forbid they are twice a week, are set up for inevitable failure. It is almost like you can feel the lack of engagement in the room. (perhaps you can really feel it!)
Despite the lack of productivity, businesses will never rid themselves of meetings — after-all, you do need to have a meeting now and again. This is where you can share important business updates, discuss concerns, and make real change!
If getting rid of meetings is not the answer, then what is?
The answer, and here comes the most exciting part, you have to energize your meetings by establishing an effective method for organizing discussion points.
“Effective meetings don’t happen by accident ; they happen by design.” – Unknown
The problem is that most meetings come back to the same problems, questions, and concerns that you discussed the week before…. and the week before that….. and two weeks before that. The issues seem to circle around and around and no action is ever taken.
As the meeting gets going everyone is too tired, too annoyed, or too busy to pay attention. Or worse, the entire meeting goes off track and the next thing you know you are taking about last weeks picnic, Jane’s daughter, and Brian’s basketball league. Once again a meeting ends and there no decisions, no action plans, and no accountability. You will walk back into the meeting one week from now just to discuss the same problem all over again. Sound familiar?
Energize your meetings
If you want to have an effective meeting where quality decisions are made, you have to design the process for success. In order to do this you will need to:
- Identify burning issues
- Identify whether progress has been made on past decisions
- Determine action plans
- Assign accountability
There are a number of tools that can help you track your KPI’s and identify areas of concern. smartcockpit is a cutting edge way to manage your business by tracking indicators, identifying areas of concern, allocating responsibility, and measuring success.
The platform allows you to set targets and quickly identify if you are on track. When sitting in your weekly meeting you immediately know that you do not need to discuss operations. However, the red blocks suggests that there is something going on with customer satisfaction. There may or may not be an issue with cash and your market shares. You can open your indicator on customer satisfaction, see where the issue is, and decide if this is an actual problem. If not, you change the indicator to green, explain why it is a non-issue and move on. If it is in fact a problem you can discuss action plans, set goals, and the next week you can measure any positive or negative changes.
Instead of being bogged down and annoyed by ineffective meetings you can quickly make high quality and informed decisions! Energize your meetings by identifying burning issues, making action plans, assigning responsibility, and continually measuring the change process.
What do you think? How do you energize your buisness meetings?