We spend most of our time attending meetings, and a meeting is the most time waster if it is not managed properly, sometimes you find yourself walking into a meeting without even realizing why you are required for such a meeting. Meetings cost the enterprise a lot of money and most of times benefits are not realized nor quantified, meeting managed is one of the areas that seriously need some discipline and control, in this post I will give some tips to avoid meetings chaos and also will propose a concept called Meeting Calculator that I wish Calendars program will adopt it in the future.

You finish one meeting, then you enter another, then you suddenly find yourself pulled into another, you look at your watch and you find out that the day is over and not too much has been achieved, meetings need real attention of every team member, and often times meetings style is part of the organization’s style, being a project manager you need to set ground rules for your project, and a very important rule is meeting management, a rule has to organize pre-meeting, in-meeting, and post-meeting activities, if you do not have such rules you can simply use the following list to start putting some discipline into your meetings, once you start following the rules, you will feel a real difference and you will have more time to focus on activities that matter rather than wasting your time and team’s time, while you may have read similar articles about the meeting organization tips, the following ones are my own observations, and the classification of pre-meeting, in-meeting, and post-meeting is more helpful.

Pre-Meeting

You can use the following checklist to before you call for the meeting:

• Define the Meeting Objectives: a meeting has to have at least one objective, some meetings are held to solve a problem, take a decision, to give FYI presentation, status reporting, brainstorming, etc. if you are unable to define the objective do not call for the meeting!
• Define Meeting Agenda: take the objectives you defined in the previous step and define the meeting agenda, try to break the topics of the meeting as much as you can, this important for meetings that involve big number of participants, do not merge two topics unless the topic will be presented by a group of attendees, it is very important to break the meeting topics as small as you can so every participant will know what is expected from him, a simple table like the below one can help outline the meeting agenda

• Book Required Resources: check the availability of required resources such as projector, meeting room, flip chart, etc. most of organizations manage shared resources on the domain, so you can simply check the availability right from your messaging application (e.g. Microsoft Outlook)
• Invite Required Members ONLY: you need to invite required attendees only, required means people who are going to be part of the discussions, not those who will only watch and remain silent, make sure to spot a time that suits everyone, most of Personal Information Manager (PIM) help you find a free slot for all meeting attendees, you will also add some people as optional in case you need to keep someone informed that the meeting is held at that time.
• Attach Required Documents: if the presentation to be used in the meeting is ready try to attach it along with the meeting invitation, this can save you too much during the meeting
• Check Acceptance Status:You will need to check the acceptance status of each invitee, if someone rejects or tentatively accepts the meeting, pick your phone and ask about the reason, emphasize that you already checked availability before sending the invitation, negotiate and see whether you can conduct the meeting without invitees who will not be able to attend, tracking the status will let you avoid any surprises

In-Meeting

Try to reach the meeting venue at least 10 minutes before to make sure all resources are ready and functioning, and to avoid any surprise, during the meeting you can do the following:

• Revisit Objectives & Agenda: tell the attendees about the objectives of the meeting and go quickly over the agenda, doing so will let everyone know that the agenda has to be followed and objectives have to be fulfilled
• Name Meeting Minutes Taker: name the person who is going to record minutes of meeting and action items
• Be an Icebreaker: start with a big smile on your face, believe me it helps, if you have new faces in the meeting, let everyone present himself and his role in the meeting, a good technique is also to add to someone’s word like “ John is also responsible for the quality of all the deliverables “
• Just Do It: follow the agenda and control the meeting, being the meeting organizer, imagine yourself standing at the top corner of the meeting room watching how the meeting is going on, you will find some attendees drifting from the main objective of the meeting try to control those, and you can simply say that you might need to have another meeting for that specific purpose, when you get done with an agenda item, you can say “well, we are done with this item, Next!”, do not forget to practice active listening
• Thank You: Thank attendees for their attendance and tell them that they would receive the meeting minutes and required documents within 2 days or so

Post-Meeting

This is as important as the pre-meeting stage, you can do the following:

• Send Meeting Minutes: draft minutes of meeting, use the agenda you sent along with the meeting invitation, add list of attendees, and list of action items, add an owner and due date for each action item
• Leave the door Open: don’t think that once you send the meeting minutes everyone will just follow it, sometimes you may misunderstand what has been agreed to, and some attendees may disagree with the meeting minutes you will send, so it is very important to keep the door open, and ask for the feedback, do not impose the action items on attendees, it is advisable to write in the email “Please review the minutes of meeting and let me know in case you have any concerns, otherwise I would appreciate your cooperation in order to close these action items”, allow like a couple of days to receive feedback
• Follow up: this is the toughest part, if you do not follow up to close the action items, all the above efforts would go down the drain

Meeting Calculator

If meetings absorb most of our time and organizations productivity, why these organizations do no try to put some discipline into meetings, I do not know whether some companies have some policies for meetings or not, they tend to focus more on symbolic aspects such as dress code and stuff!

Meeting calculator is one idea that struck my mind, I though of some kind of calculator to determine the cost of all meetings in a company, by simply taking the monthly salary, including direct and indirect costs such as health insurance, gratuity, flight tickets, etc., and determining the hourly rate, a meeting organizer would be able to enter the list of attendees and the calculator determines the overall cost including resources cost as well.

As you can see the algorithm is quite simple and it would take half an hour to develop, I googled trying to see whether some similar solutions already exist, and I could find few simple standalone applications, some are desktop applications, and similar JavaScript forms that allow you to enter attendees list and it calculates the cost accordingly, I could also find an IPhone application for the same purpose, consider looking at:

- Calculate the Cost of Your Meetings

- Meeting Cost Clock ( you can run the application during the meeting and it shows the cost of the meeting as it is running, the problem with this one it can keep people tense during the meeting and distract them from the meeting’s objective, this would destroy meetings require creativity such as brainstorming sessions )

- Meeting Cost Calculator ( IPhone application )

While the above applications are really brilliant if they are used, the problem is that salaries information are very confidential in each and every organization, which makes it impractical to know the cost of a meeting either during the meeting or before it is conducted, if you are a project manager who is trying to coordinate a meeting chances are you will know the rates of your team members, but for higher positions such as CIO and CTO you will not be able to get to know their rates!

Second problem is that these applications run in silo and are not integrated with any system whatsoever, the vision I have for a meeting calculator is a bit different and resolves the previous two issues.

Meeting Calculator Usage Scenario

The below scenario elaborates on the vision I have for calculating the cost of a meeting, I wish that PIM leading companies start adopting this approach which is very much needed to have effective meetings and to assess benefit versus cost before rushing and send useless meeting invitations

1. Meeting organizer opens PIM application (I use Microsoft Outlook, Google Apps, and Mozilla Thunderbird), selects the list of attendees from the Global Access List that is integrated with the organization’s Human Resources system that includes all the salaries and benefits information of all employees, based on these items, PIM ( I can think of an Outlook Add-on or built-in functionality within Outlook itself ) will calculate the cost of the meeting
2. Salaries & benefits information will not be exposed to the meeting organizer, and non-human resources cost to be entered by the meeting organizer, the meeting organizer should be able to select one time cost as well and enter the cost of resource & once time cost to the UI of the meeting calculator (while some people will try to reverse engineer the formula to know the cost of an employee to the company, this will not of a real interest because the hourly rate includes direct & indirect costs for an employee, however the calculator will definitely give an indicator of the attendee’s benefits!)
3. Meeting calculator should update the meeting cost field every time the meeting organizer adds new attendee, resource, fixed cost
4. Meeting calculator should show an alert to the meeting organizer before sending the invitation to attendees, the meeting organizer should be able to remove or add to the meeting to adjust the cost of the meeting
5. A meeting repository has to exist on the organization intranet, where all meetings are logged and tracked on monthly basis, each meeting organizer should be able to track meetings he conducted on a certain period, and also can add some notes to the meeting specifying whether the meeting has been productive or not, and also to edit attendees list in case someone did not show up, and this would change the meeting cost
6. A meeting officer should be able to track meetings and cost of each meeting and draft monthly report on cost of meetings, this will enable the organization to optimize meetings management

I am sure that such a system can easily be built and marketed to large enterprises, what do you think of this approach, please leave a comment and re-tweet, if you also have some tips to share for better meetings, please leave a comment!

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