Effective Meeting With 3W - Do A Small Thing For The Bigger Impact

How often do you have meetings in a week? Have you ever thought how effective all the meetings you have attended, especially if we are the facilitator who leads the meeting? Then, if it is not too effective, have you reviewed what makes them ineffective and how they can be more effective?

According to the Mr. Wikipedia, meeting is a session when two or more people come together to discuss one or more topics. It’s often in a formal or business setting (but also occur in a variety of other environments). Meeting is a tool for an organization to have effective communication and collaboration on achieving some goals.

The success of a meeting starts with the facilitator who organizes the meeting, leads and takes action to follow up on the results of the meeting effectively. Based on my professional experience, below is a simple guidance on how we can achieve our goals effectively through meetings (mostly depend on the meeting facilitator) and please put your attention to the last items (post-meeting) where most of us underestimate these little things while it will affect the effectiveness of the meeting.:

Pre-Meeting

• Define the objective and the set expected outcomes
• Prepare the agenda - Also, ask resources to prepare anything required for the meeting (i.e. material presentation, required action item from previous meeting)
• Send the meeting invitation at least 2-3 days before - This is to make sure that attendees able to manage their schedule in case they have conflict. Please also ensure we share the meting objective and detail agenda. You should also ensure that mandatory peoples required on the meeting are available (check through their agenda, Ms. Outlook has this capability)
• Invite relevant peoples only

During the Meeting

• Convey the objective and agenda when opening the meeting
• Set the fixed time (start and end) and the meeting or facilitator should stick to the agenda, time and focus to expected outcomes
• Provide enough time for question & answer session before meeting ended (but please still stick to the time).

Post-Meeting

• Crate Minutes of Meeting with 3W included and send to all attendee soon after the meeting

Let’s focus on the last things. I am sure that most of us are familiar with 3W. for those of you who don't know it yet, the 3W is an abbreviation of What, Who and When. It’s more like a summary of the action items need to be follow up from our meeting.

Why we need to have 3W in our meeting? Because without 3W we can say that our meeting is a NATO (No Action, Talk Only) and it just like we have a very good plan without executing the plan (can you imagine how we can achieve something without any action?)

3W is a simple thing that people usually forget but has a significant impact to our productivity where we can ensure to achieve whatever would like to be achieved from the meeting. It as actually an action items from the meeting with the clear items, person in charge and estimated completion that could be tracked and monitored.

• What: Define clearly all item required to be followed up (the item should represents the expected deliverable)
• Who: Define the PIC (person in charge) that are responsible for each of the item. Make sure it refers specifically to the person (i.e. Department X - Person Y would be better instead of Department X).
• When: Put the estimated completion date and ensure agreed by each PIC during the meeting (ask them to commit to the target completion date).

The last important thing is to setup next checkpoint meeting as a control to make sure that deliverable from the meeting is completed by refer to the 3W and the objective of the meeting is achieved.

So, Lets do a small thing with minimal effort and feel the impact on the productivity of your organization!

Have a good meeting guys…

Zainal Mutaqin (Inal)

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/zainal-mutaqin/

Note: I believe that above article is still far from the perfection, so feel free for any constructive criticism, input or correction on the comment.