Do these two things to have a highly productive Meeting, VC or Con-call

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https://bloggershiv.com/do-these-two-things-to-have-a-highly-productive-meeting-vc-or-con-call/

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Too often we find ourselves feeling disappointed coming out of a meeting or ending a VC or a Con call with what feels like a waste of time. I can tell you by experience it is not a nice feeling, after all Time is the most precious resource, we all have in life. We know it is limited and we want to be most productive specially at work so that we can achieve results and feel as we have made the most of our time in office or meetings. This is a frustrating point across meetings, across companies and across countries.

So how do we make sure that we have a highly productive meeting and post meeting do not get a feeling of time wasted? There are a lot of articles already written about it, however I feel from experience and experimenting, if we do these two things, we will give ourselves a highly productive meeting each and every single time:

 1.    Design Your Meeting Agenda around Questions

 A meeting is usually driven by its agenda therefore it’s important to have it right. When you design your agenda around questions that need answers, you usually will have a meeting where those will get answered or an action item will get created to find the answers. However most often than naught we end up keeping general points in the agenda and that can typically take the discussions tangent. For example, if you need to discuss about the action steps to re-open your operations post Covid lockdown, a lot of people do write the agenda simply as “Covid” or “Lockdown” or “Post Covid” or “Post Lockdown”. Instead if you want to ask, “what are the action steps we need to take to safeguard people once we restart operations post lockdown?”, “What will be the action points at the entry gate for people? For material?”, “How do we sanitize our office, machines and work places?” etc. These are pointed questions, which will fetch exact answers instead of people generally discussing on Covid or Lockdown during the meeting.

 2.    Avoid Bike-Shed Effect

Bike-shed effect also known as the Law of Triviality was defined by Parkinson as:

In a company, the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the amount of money involved.

Parkinson took an example of a company which has three points on its agenda:

1.    Proposal to make an investment of $ 10 Mn on a nuclear reactor

2.    Proposal to build a $350 bicycle shed for employees

3.    Proposal for $21 worth of refreshments supply for a committee

Usually the most important agenda on the item, that of a nuclear reactor is passed the quickest because not many people contribute to the discussion due to its vastness, technicality and because people already know the decision in the Boss’s mind and no one wants to oppose or discuss due to lack of concrete discussion points. However, when discussion moves to bicycle shed suddenly everyone want to contribute. Everyone wants to pitch in and although the money involved is small, everyone wants to get in a word. It becomes even worse for the third point. Now everyone becomes an expert in the field of refreshments. They all want to discuss the complete issue threadbare and a lot of time may eventually be spent on discussing ways to either save that money or implement it in the best possible way.

How to avoid Bike-Shed effect?

Go back to point no 1. Create your agenda around your questions and avoid all unnecessary points for the meeting. The manager or the meeting lead could have easily discussed bike-shed or refreshment points offline one to one with concerned departments. This way the focus could have been only and only on the most critical point – nuclear reactor proposal and the questions which were needed to be answered / thrashed threadbare to move forward on the same.

 In Conclusion

For a highly productive meeting, design your agenda around the questions you need answers. Avoid Bike-shedding effect by carefully choosing the topics you want to include in the agenda. Those topics which can be done one-to-one offline should be avoided as agenda points in larger group meetings.

I do look forward to your inputs / comments / suggestions in the comments section below. I do hope the above read was worth your time. In case you need to connect with me, please do at [email protected]

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