Some Pretty Good Ps For Planning a Meeting

How much money and time are wasted in meetings every year? Estimates range from one-third to half your time. That adds up to millions! Here are some useful things to consider when planning for a meeting that's worth your-and everyone else's-time. I've framed them in terms of some pretty good Ps. If you take these in order, you have a Plan. And planned time always generates better outcomes than unplanned time.

• Being explicit about the considerations below will help you:

• allocate your attendees' time better,

• set expectations ahead of time so people are prepared,

• eliminate confusion about attendance, so people who aren't needed can make better use of their time,

• attain the outcomes you want, so you don't have to keep revisiting issues in other meetings.

Point
What's the point of your meeting? What real outcomes do you want to get from the time spent? Being clear about the point of your meeting adds focus, allows you to communicate the meeting's importance, and better ensures that your attendees will show up and participate. Try to define your outcomes as behaviorally as you can. Are you looking for a decision? A list of alternative solutions for a problem you're working on? Agreement on a position or problem? Keep in mind that if your meeting is strictly for providing one-way information from you to your team, there are usually other ways to handle that type of communication without scheduling a room and holding a meeting.

Program
What's the list of topics you need to address in the meeting? In what order do they need to be addressed? Make a list of each topic and its respective outcome (point), and check for consistency and coherence across topics. This is your meeting agenda, which should be written down and sent out prior to the meeting, so the participants will know what to expect and bring any materials or information they need to pull together ahead of time.

Participants
Who needs to be there? What's the effect on the meeting's outcomes if they don't show up? For each topic, identify who must be there and separate them from those you might like to be there, or those who might want to be there even when they have little to add to the outcomes. One way to identify must-have attendees is to ask yourself, "What will this person contribute? Specialized knowledge? A valuable perspective or insight? Political influence that will be needed later?" Questions like these can help you identify the essential personnel for your meeting. If some people are not needed, perhaps their time could be better spent doing other aspects of their jobs.

Place
Where will the meeting take place? Can your use an office, or a local meeting room, or do you need to schedule some offsite location? Remember that offsite meetings can be very valuable, but they can also eat up time. Balance your place with your point and your participants with respect to travel, access, and time away from the job.

Process
It's to your advantage to think a bit about how you would handle each topic in your program. What meeting techniques or methods will you use? Here's a sample to start with:

• presentation and discussion, for formulating an issue and exploring its ramifications

• brainstorm, for generating ideas and alternatives

• voting or nominal group technique, for making group decisions

• small-group work session, for generating practical solutions or building parts of a plan as a group

• group activity, for building group cohesiveness and spirit.

There are others, but I hope this will get you started. Be sure that you know how to use the techniques you choose. Or have someone there to facilitate the meeting, so you get the outcomes you want.

Plan
For each topic on the program, identify the time needed to get the outcome you want. Balance this with the process you use, so you can allocate enough time. It's very common to underestimate the time needed to handle a topic adequately, and that leads to either going overtime or scheduling another meeting to address the things we didn't get to this time. Remember that it's always better to give time back than to ask for more at the end when everyone expects to leave.

It's often more useful to hold several scheduled tightly-focused meetings than one long one. Keep in mind that our attention spans were shaped by our school classes (40 minutes), and further modified by television between commercials (12 minutes). So plan with short activities in mind, and you'll get more focused results.

Provisions
In this case, provisions includes two things: prepared materials and food. If there are materials that attendees (or you) need to prepare ahead of time for the meeting, this is the time to list them out and let people know. The rule here is "No surprises". Presentation materials, data sheets, context descriptions, and the like are commonly needed for productive meetings. But how much time is wasted when someone says, "I have that information in my office. Just give me a minute and I'll go get it."?

With respect to food, the rule of "Feed them and they will come," still holds true. These days, however, refreshments are not always supported by corporate economic constraints. And choices in this area usually are moderated by corporate culture and budget. Whether or not you serve refreshments, it's helpful for people to know beforehand.

Pull It Together
Before you distribute your meeting agenda, spend a little time looking at how the topics fit together. If you have multiple topics-but not everyone is needed for all of them-can you rearrange your program (agenda) to make better use of your attendees time? Can some attendees leave when the topics that are relevant to them are complete? Can others come in half-way, perhaps during a break, rather than sit through topics that aren't relevant to them?

Think about the way people, topic, process, time, and place fit together and develop your meeting agenda to make sure you're using your attendees' time the most effective way. This will give you a much higher likelihood of getting your outcomes and good feedback from your participants.

Publish
The last step in this process is to develop your agenda, with all these elements in it, and distribute it to your attendees. The rule of thumb here is 2-5 days in advance, especially if attendees have to prepare materials to bring with them. Don't forget to make additional copies of your agenda to bring with you to the meeting. Oddly enough, people sometimes forget to print out their agenda and bring it along.

If you give a little attention to this set of Pretty Good Ps for meetings you'll find out that your meetings are better organized, run more smoothly, get better results, and receive good feedback. So give it a try, refine your methods of meeting planning, and enjoy your meetings for a change.