CI DILEMMA MAY/JUNE 2020
CI Dilemma
Meeting madness
During lockdown, a management team’s previously slick meetings have become ineffi cient
and lost their eff ectiveness
O ur factory has been operating a
skeleton staff during the
lockdown, mainly performing
maintenance tasks and fulfi lling whatever
orders we can. Senior management has
largely worked from home, with daily team
meetings taking place on Zoom. On-site,
we’re experts at short, effi cient meetings,
getting everything done within a quarter of
an hour on the shopfl oor. However, while
we’ve been at home, these meetings have
been getting gradually longer – often taking
the full 40 minutes allowed by Zoom.
We’ve even had people ask to restart the
CI Solution Mark Richardson, principal consultant, T&T Suiko
You need to re-instate some discipline and
structure to enable your meeting. Using an
approach such as the 4Ps (Plan, Prepare,
Participate & Pursue) will help you with this:
Plan
When planning a meeting you need to
ask yourself the following key questions:
What am I hoping to achieve by holding
the meeting?
Who needs to attend the meeting?
What is the most appropriate forum
for the meeting?
What are the most appropriate tools
and techniques to use?
Prepare
Using clear guidance such as a clearly
structured agenda helps to maintain
discipline and supports you to achieve
clear outputs. A SPACER agenda helps
you eff ectively plan your meeting by
ensuring that you consider each point as
follows before starting:
S: Safety. Begin each meeting with a safety
tip. This can be a workplace safety tip such
as watching out for trailing cables or a
personal safety tip such as reiterating
social distancing advice.
P: Purpose. What is the purpose of the
meeting/event? Why are people attending?
This could be the same as the learning
objectives in a training situation.
A: Agenda. For every meeting, an agenda
must be distributed in advance. A thorough
agenda includes meeting location, names of
participants, time frames and a purpose.
C: Code of Conduct. In training, we also call
the code of conduct ‘ground rules’. This
might include beginning and ending
on time, turning off phones and, for
Zoom calls, staying muted until
it’s your turn to speak.
E: Expectations. What do the
participants expect? There are
many ways to gather expectations.
You can ask for them ahead of time,
you ask the participants to write them
down on Post-it notes and then stick them
on on a fl ip chart, or you could set up a
WhatsApp group for feedback.
R: Roles and Responsibilities. During a
meeting, there should be a timekeeper,
a scribe, a facilitator, and attendees. The
facilitator does not have to know anything
about the meeting topic. Their job is to
keep everyone on track during the meeting.
Participate
It is the responsibility of both the chair
and the team members to play an active
part to ensure the success of a meeting.
While the chair is responsible for the
smooth running of the meeting, everyone
is responsible for ensuring they arrive on
time. This is very important as late arrivals
and delays in getting the meeting started
will impact on the success of the meeting
meeting once it’s expired to ‘keep the
conversation going’.
This has infuriated me and several other
members of the team. I understand that
it’s nice to catch up at times like this, but
we’ve spent years perfecting lean meetings
and it seems that we’ve lost our discipline.
How do we regain that effi cient mind-set,
even over video conference – and then how
do we pick it back up to its previous levels
when we’re all back together in person?
and commitments of the group. If you are
unable to attend a meeting, appropriate
arrangements should be made with clear
guidance as to responsibility.
Attendees to a meeting are responsible
for preparing for the meeting and
making clear, concise and
relevant contributions, listening
to and acknowledging the
contributions of others in a
constructive manner and
agreeing decisions and actions
using consensus, ensuring that
everyone has an opportunity to have
their views heard.
When ending the meeting, review the
actions captured, review whether the
objective of the meeting was achieved and
agree a date and time for the next meeting.
Pursue
The success of a meeting is supported by
delivery of the outcomes and follow-up
actions from the chair and team members.
After a meeting, make sure lessons learned
are communicated, key actions and
decisions are circulated in a timely manner
and actions are followed up and completed.
By following these steps and taking time
to eff ectively plan your meetings – in
whatever form they take – you will be able
to maintain your discipline and achieve an
effi cient meeting mind-set.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Do you agree with our expert? How would you ensure the team stays on track during online meetings?
Send us your views and you could appear here next month. Email: chris.beck@markallengroup.com
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