Who Hates Meetings? Turn your Meetings from Time Wasters to Productivity Makers

Do you find meetings a waste of time and energy? Most business owners do too, because meetings are plagued with some of these chronic challenges:

They never start on time.
People don't come prepared.
You feel like the changes discussed in the meetings don't actually happen.
Participants are distracted and not paying attention.
The consultation rambles.
You never get through the agenda.

In this weeks video I share a lot of simple, easy to implement strategies to turn your meetings from time wasters to productivity makers.  Take notes!

0:00 Introduction
0:15 Rev Up Your Business with Dan Holstein
1:24 Timed Agenda
3:07 Progress
3:38 RED Yellow Green
5:19 Challenges Offline
5:45 Mindset Check-in

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Transcript

Who hates meetings?

We all do! When they're unproductive that is.

I'm going to be sharing some strategies with you this week on how to run an effective meeting to make it a productivity maker and not a time
waster. 

Stick around.

If you're the owner of a high-growth business, the last thing you probably want to do is to stop for more meetings and your team probably doesn't want to attend your meetings anyway.

Most meetings are basically a waste of time, they go over time, they meander, nothing gets done, everyone feels like they just had their time wasted and they'll never get that time back during the day.

But meetings can be your secret weapon and a fantastic productivity tool to keep the team on-point, focused, accountable and moving your enterprise forward.

I want to share with you in this video a couple of strategies that my clients find useful for making sure they've run effective meetings so they can actually grow their business and make their meetings a highly effective tool for growth.

Number one thing, we want to establish some ground rules.

When we're in the meeting environment what is acceptable, and not acceptable, behaviour.

For example, cell phones down and off, so there's no interruptions.
One person speaking at a time so no sidebar conversations happening.
No interruptions. Participation.

Making sure everyone understands that they have to participate in the meeting.

They have to arrive prepared. Things like that. You want to make sure that everyone is clear on those ground rules so they can adhere to them so that you can have an effective meeting. 

The next thing is, we have a timed agenda for the meeting and what I mean by that is there's certain things that you'll want to cover in the meeting

I'll share an example in a minute, and you want to make sure that you're giving a specific
amount of time to each of those agenda areas. and as you implement something like this, 
you'll find that you may need to expand or contract certain areas, give them more or less time, you'll kind of feel that as you go. 

The next thing is we want to start on time.

That sounds very simple, of course we'd start on time, but a lot of meetings don't start on time because we're waiting for somebody who's a little bit late or running behind. We need to send a strong message of discipline here in the meeting that we're going to have good meeting discipline, we're going to start on time every time, so that your team will show up and they know that it's going to start without them if they don't show up and they might miss out on their contribution or accountability.

The next thing is we need to end on time!

Right so if we're starting on time we need to end on time that way people respect the boundary of the meeting and they can they can block their time around it and no that's not going to get impinged.

Next up I want to share with you the agenda overview for the meeting - oh one other thing when you assign it when you're going to time the meeting assign the timer someone that actually runs the clock and says okay enough we have to ELMO which means "enough let's move on" and move on to the next item.

 It doesn't have to be you.  You can assign it to each individual throughout your meeting structure and have one person do it each week or each month depending on your meeting frequency.

I'm going to share with you an agenda overview so what everyone gets together, the first thing we want to do is we want to make sure that we put some positivity on what's going on.

Often with business there's challenges, sometimes we can get stuck in on the challenges and just see them, they're so approximate.

We want to make sure that every member of the team arrives with a Win.  Something to celebrate, something that's going well that everyone else can celebrate their win and have their win celebrated as well.

We're going to start off on a positive note.

The next thing is we want to review our progress.

And what I mean by review progress is, how are we doing on the initiatives we set out to accomplish?

How are we doing on overcoming the challenges that we've been facing? We don't want to have vague terms like "yeah we're doing good, we're doing okay,  we're doing better."

We want to have some kind of a system where you can indicate clearly what our status is. For example there's an excellent book called "American Icon" and it's about how Alan Mulally who
became the CEO of Ford Motor Company turned the company around. One of the things that he did with his executive team was a red-yellow-green card system and it's brilliant in its simplicity.

The red card means "we have a problem and we don't know what to do." In other words, we're stuck."

Yellow card means "we have a challenge but we know what to do and we're taking affirmative action to overcome it."

And the green card means "we're on-point, we're doing well, we're on progress, we're doing ok."

With that, we want to see here is that, there's probably going to be a smattering of red yellow and green. You  want to watch out for your team constantly showing up with green cards.  Unless you're truly doing amazing things, there's going to be challenges and if someone on your team doesn't show up with a red or yellow card every once in a while you can bet that they're hiding something. They're not sure how to express that they've got a challenge they're
trying to work it out on their own and they're not trying to get some support on that. If someone doesn't come with a red or yellow card for a while, take them aside and just have an
offline conversation say "Hey how is everything truly going? Is there anything that you need help with?" Just don't let that - constant greens look like it's all perfect, and there might be the little challenge lurking there.

The next thing is, we want to review our metrics.

Our KPIs or our critical number. And it's going to be different depending on what's going on with your business but for example if you're growing your sales, you want to track how
many new proposals have we put out, many new leads have we generated, how many meetings have we gone to, how many new clients have come on board?  We want to be able to track that.

If you're a distributor or you have distribution in your business, we want to track inventory turns, how fast we turn your inventory around.  If you have a service-based business, 
you want to track your technician utilization.  Out of all the billable hours in a week how many are all of your technicians actually billing? We want to make sure we grow that ratio so that we're more and more productive.

You'll have key numbers in your business that you'll want to be tracking depending on the nature of your business and also what you've got going on, what you're focusing on, what you're looking to improve  and change in your business.

Sometimes what's going to happen is somebody's going to have a challenge in one of the key areas of the business and it's going to start going off into a bit of the weeds. 
That's the time we want to have someone say "hey let's just ELMO that - Enough Let's Move On - and take that topic and allocate time with leadership outside the meeting to do a deeper dive on that topic so that everyone else around the table that doesn't have, the challenge doesn't bear on them, they're not having their time wasted. 

And at the end of the meeting what we want to do is have a mindset check-in. What I mean by that is just "okay how's everybody doing?" "Doing good, excited, I'm feeling a little bit worn out..." We just want to take the pulse of the team and just see how is everybody doing so if there's anything anyone's starting to have a little bit of a challenge in terms of their energy or what's going on with them, that you can identify that and then have a chat with them.

The next thing that we want to do here, to remember rather, is we need to have consistency with our meetings. Whatever our meeting structure and timeline is going to be, if it's weekly or if it's monthly, it'll depend on your business, or daily, you want to make sure that you stick with it.  Don't stop, and then start.

So start with a frequency that you can maintain so that everyone knows the meeting is going to happen it's going to start and end on time and it's going to be productive and they're going to get something out of it, and you're going to be moving your business forward.

I hope this has been helpful for you and I hope that you do get back with your team and reinstitute having good structured meetings to help grow your business.

If you have any questions about anything like this I love to hear from you and have a chat about how meeting structure can help your business out, and help you grow.