Efficient vs. Effective Meetings

What??! Another post about meetings! Yes, after writing that post I realized that if you have never organized or run a meeting before, running a Google-style efficient meeting might not be so high on your "Next Action" list. So I've decided to put together a little cheat sheet on organizing and running an EFFECTIVE meeting.

First off, you might ask what is the difference between "Effective" and "Efficient". To put it as best as I know, being efficient means getting the job done in a short amount of time. However, being effective means getting the job done RIGHT. For example, you can stay up late the night before writing and organizing your big presentation and this would be efficient, because you spent 8 consecutive hours to finish it, while others might have spent 20 hours or more spread out over a period of a few months. However, whose presentation do you think will be more EFFECTIVE in convincing the audience?

The first step to organizing a meeting is to figure out why do you need to have a meeting? Do you really need a meeting, or can the problems be solved via a few quick emails/phone calls? How much time do you think the meeting will need to take? Using these you can start to outline your meeting agenda.

Next you actually need to think about your meeting venue. How many people will need to attend the meeting? Are there any special audio/visual/computer needs? Is everyone physically located near each other or will some meeting attendees need to travel or teleconference to participate?

Now, scheduling a meeting is often pretty tricky, especially with people having tons of other commitments and full calendars. The key to overcoming this is early planning. If at all possible get meetings scheduled at least two weeks in advance. Even better is that you can use free online tools such as TimeToMeet which you can use to poll your attendees for the best times for holding the meeting. Also be sure to send out the meeting agenda in advance for people to review as well as a meeting reminder.

OK, you've made it to the meeting (hopefully a 10 or 15 minutes early for any set-up and last minute preparations). Now what do you do? As people file in, be sure to greet them (by name if you know them - learn and reembmer their name if you don't). Do an Ice Breaker! Run your meeting according to your agenda, encouraging all attendees to participate (if they don't participate what's the purpose in them coming and not just receiving the minutes).
When your meeting is about to come to an end, always be sure summarize the key points of the meeting, list any action items that need to be addressed before the next meeting, and let people know when the minutes will be sent out (you did have a note taker right?).

Afterwards be sure to leave time for some open discussion / questions. For non-work types of meetings (such as at community / student organization general meeting), it might be worthwhile to devote an extra 15 - 30 minutes for general networking / chit-chat and other minor business that attendees might not feel comfortable with bringing up during the formal meeting.

Hopefully these hints will give you an idea about how to run an effective meeting. Comments, including stories about particularly successfully run meetings you've attended or organized, as always are always welcome and appreciated! Until next time.

-Jason