Maybe it is my personality, maybe I am just an impatient person, or maybe it is really unproductive the way we can plan to plan when we are going to sit down and develop a plan. Meetings have never been a strong favorite of mine, and I probably will take many hits for stating this, but according to the size of your organization, sometimes meetings can plan your way out of being productive and getting desired results.
Three days after hearing something, only around ten percent of the subject is retained. If you couple this lack of retention with the labor cost of having a meeting outside of normal work hours plus any lunch or refreshments that you might provide, meetings can be high in cost without the business getting a good return on the investment. There are many things that you will inevitably have to meet about, but choose your meetings wisely and remember a few tips to keep the meetings as beneficial as possible.
If you have a meeting, have a defined agenda and follow it. This will keep things on subject and prevent the gathering from turning into a gripe-fest. It will also allow you to keep up the pace and complete the meeting in a timely fashion. Also, try visual aids and handouts to go along with the meeting topic. Retention of the subject matter is greatly increased when spoken instruction is accompanied with the visual. Schedule enough time to allow for questions / feedback at the end of the meeting. If anything is brought up that you don’t know how to address, or if any new items are brought up for discussion, assure the group that you will have to get back with them on the subject. Group meetings aren’t the time to shoot from the hip if you aren’t prepared with accurate information. You will find if you give erroneous information, the retention of that information by the employees will approach 100%.
Think productively when it comes to dissemination of information in your office. Is a meeting the best way to get out info? If you have interoffice email, a bullet point memo may take care of things. According to the size and number of sites you have for your business, electronic communication may work best. Use technology to your advantage. Products are out there now where you can have virtual meetings, cutting down on repetition, unproductive breaks in a day, and travel expense.
Sometimes you can plan all you want for a new procedure, policy or product implementation in your office, but the best plans have to be general and flexible enough to realize you may have to change things once the change is implemented. As much as you might not like it, some changes have to be implemented one to three people at a time just due to the nature of the subject. A good example is implementation of a secure patient communications system. A large group meeting could be held and everyone be shown how to do it by projector/PowerPoint, etc., but usually these things are best conveyed one on one or in small groups. Another advantage to communicating/training incrementally is that you can perfect the training, develop the procedures needed and work out some of the bugs prior to putting the final procedures/policies in place for usage of the new methods. Once everyone has been instructed individually or in small groups, then the whole group can be brought together with a projector and refreshed on the procedures.
When all else fails, sometimes, you just have to be like Nike, and JUST DO IT. As managers, we have to realize that no amount of planning can take the place of just rolling up your sleeves and getting the task accomplished or at least underway. We can kill innovation, creativity and results when we plan too much. A study was done where a group of four year olds and a group of MBA’s were given the same number of blocks and tasked with building the highest structure in the shortest amount of time from the blocks. The four year olds won a majority of the time because they didn’t spend their time planning; they just got to the matter at hand. They also did not have the fear of failure and the problem of starting over when a design did not work.
Even the best laid plans have to be flexible and may have to change over time. There is little in our offices that have to be etched in stone. If we can go into change and planning with these thoughts, we might be able to get results that are not prevented by our dependence on planning to plan when we are going to sit down and plan.