Are Your Meetings Costing You? The Case for Standardizing Meeting Management

By Andrew Lenti , Managing Director at Topp Tactical Intelligence, London

Why Treat Meetings Like a Business Process?

Most organizations would agree that critical operations such as financial reporting, production, or customer service follow set procedures to ensure consistent results. However meetings, which often serve as the backbone of decision-making, are frequently left to personal management styles. As a result, meetings often run too long, agendas go off-track, or important follow-ups fall through the cracks.

Treating meeting management as a structured process solves these common challenges by ensuring meetings are standardized, focused, and productive. Here's why this approach is beneficial:

1. Consistency Across the Organization: When every department follows the same meeting protocol, it ensures consistency across the organization. Everyone knows what to expect from meetings, how to prepare, how to contribute, and what is expected afterward.
2. Clear Objectives and Agendas: Recurring meetings often lose focus without a structured approach. By treating them as processes, you ensure that clear agendas are set before each meeting, allowing participants to come prepared and align discussions with the company’s strategic goals.
3. Better Use of Time: Time is a finite resource, and meetings are notorious time-wasters. Structuring meetings as business processes helps optimize the time spent, minimizing the time wasted on irrelevant discussions or excessive administrative follow-up tasks.
4. Improved Accountability: Business processes are designed to have clear steps and responsible parties at each stage. Similarly, meetings managed as processes ensure accountability, where action items are clearly assigned and progress is tracked until completion.
5. Data-Driven Decision Making: With a digital platform like Presto PDCA , every meeting can be tracked, and insights can be drawn from data gathered across departments and teams. This allows leadership to make more informed decisions and monitor trends such as meeting frequency, attendance, and follow-up effectiveness.

The Challenges Growth-Focused Companies Face with Meeting Management

Many organizations experience several pain points when it comes to managing their meetings. As companies scale, they often face:

• Inconsistent Meeting Formats: Different teams may run meetings in completely different ways, leading to confusion and inefficiencies.
• Lack of Follow-Through: How often have you left a meeting feeling like no clear actions were agreed upon or followed through? Inadequate follow-up is a major barrier to progress.
• Overwhelming Administrative Load: Manually preparing agendas, distributing meeting materials, and chasing participants for feedback adds unnecessary administrative work.
• Too Much Time Spent on Repetitive Meetings: Companies frequently fall into the trap of holding too many meetings without considering whether they are all necessary or productive.

Without a standardized approach, meetings can quickly devolve into time-wasters rather than value-adds.

How Presto PDCA Digitizes and Streamlines Meeting Management

To address these challenges, we recently launched a new meeting management feature in our flagship platform Presto PDCA showcasing in a live webinar how added structured discipline to recurring meeting management will bring great efficiencies to the growth-focused company.

Watch the full webinar here

Using Presto PDCA, meeting management becomes a structured process that’s integrated into the workflow. Here's how it works:

1. Step 1: Set Up the Meeting Agenda The meeting setup begins by capturing the meeting agenda directly on the Presto PDCA dashboard. This agenda is aligned with the company’s strategic goals, ensuring that every meeting serves a purpose.
2. Step 2: Add Meeting Templates and Standard Documents Presto PDCA offers templates for branded meeting agendas and minutes. This eliminates the need for each department to create their own, promoting consistency across the organization. Standardized templates ensure that every key point is addressed and action items are documented properly.
3. Step 3: Schedule the Meeting Scheduling is made simple by integrating directly into participants’ calendars. The agenda is automatically distributed to participants, who can review it ahead of time and provide feedback or input. Automated reminders are also sent, ensuring full preparedness.
4. Step 4: Chairing the Meeting During the meeting, Presto PDCA facilitates the flow of discussion and ensures that action items are captured and assigned. The platform encourages active participation by giving team members the ability to provide real-time input and feedback.
5. Step 5: Follow-Up and Feedback After the meeting, Presto PDCA automatically sends out the minutes and action items, ensuring everyone is on the same page. It also collects feedback from participants to improve the effectiveness of future meetings. Any action items that require follow-up are tracked and managed within the platform.

The Benefits of Using Presto PDCA for Meeting Management

By treating recurring meetings as structured processes and using Presto PDCA to automate meeting management, organizations can expect:

• Enhanced Productivity: With structured agendas, streamlined scheduling, and automated follow-ups, meetings become more focused and productive.
• Consistency and Standardization: By standardizing the way meetings are managed across the organization, companies ensure that meetings are aligned with their strategic goals.
• Reduced Administrative Load: Presto PDCA automates much of the manual work involved in meeting management, saving valuable time for employees.
• Increased Accountability: With automated action item tracking and follow-up, no tasks fall through the cracks, and participants are held accountable for their deliverables.

Watch the Webinar and Learn More

Missed our live webinar? No worries! Click here to watch the full webinar on-demand and see firsthand how Presto PDCA can revolutionize your meeting management.

For businesses looking to scale efficiently and ensure consistent, productive meetings, implementing a digital meeting management system like Presto PDCA can be a game-changer. Standardizing and digitizing meetings as business processes will not only enhance your company’s performance but also drive long-term growth.

Incorporating structured meeting management practices into your company is one of the easiest and most impactful changes you can make to improve overall operational efficiency. Book a demo with us today and start transforming how your organization handles meetings.