Meetings: Background Noise

I just got off of a conference call where something was flapping and ticking in the background on someone’s phone – annoying.  Distracting. 

And distracting means ineffective.
Lots of meetings these days take place over the phone.  If you’re on one of these virtual meetings, watch your own background noise.  Dogs barking, fans blowing, wind coming in from the window over speaker phone, kids bursting in, keyboard clicking next to speaker, and on it goes.  Here’s what happens: we hear a strange noise on the conference call and our brains wonder what it is.  Our attention gets pulled off what’s going on.  Then you get annoyed, wondering if other people hear that noise.  Then finally someone says, “please put your phone on mute.”  By that time, the people in the meeting have lost focus – not in a big way, but enough.Solution?  Use a headset.  Also, if you’re not sure if your environment is quiet enough, do a test call with a friend.

Meetings: Protect Your Calendar

Your calendar should reflect what your working on and what your goals are.  Think of your calendar as a place where time is blocked out to do things.  Too often we think of our calendars as a place just for meetings.  Then what happens is someone sees a blank spot and schedules another meeting.  Before you know it, your day is mostly meetings.  Some people have this odd feeling of accomplishment when their days ARE filled with meetings, “look at me, I’m really busy.”   Busy isn’t what we should be striving for, we should be striving for effective.  If your day is filled with meetings, then you’re ineffective.  Period.  Yeah you might have a day filled with meetings once in a while.  That happens.  But every week?  That’s just plain ineffective.

If you follow David Allen’s, Getting Things Done approach to time management, you know you have a list of projects, which cascade into tasks.  Say you need to draft a copy of a document.  You should have that time blocked off on your calendar, especially those that have a specific due date coming up.  Anything you systematically need time for should be on your calendar, like doing email, doing your weekly review, etc.

Meetings: You Should Say No More Often

You get invited to a meeting – in fact you probably get asked to attend meetings many times a day. If you’re in a virtual environment where you get electronic requests to dial in, there’s usually a simple ‘Accept’, ‘Reject’, and ‘Tentative’ button to acknowledge the request. It’s so easy to hit that ‘Accept’ request button if it says you have time on your calendar. Guess what?

YOU CAN SAY NO!

In fact, you should probably say ‘no’! You should probably say no ½ the time! I’m serious! Just say no! Yeah you have to think about it: are you a key decision maker, who’s doing the ask, and do you have some key deliverable to present, but most of the time you should say no. Manager Tools business consultants, Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne in their podcast, Calendar Control – Say No, advocate this very practice – say no. Bias towards no. Say no frequently.

Listen: you won’t be evaluated at the end of the year on how many meetings you went to or how ‘busy’ you were with meetings. You’ll be assessed on what you got done. Saying no frees up time to get work done.

DO: Open your calendar right now and decline a meeting – RIGHT NOW

DO: Say NO to a meeting today.

DO: Say no to a meeting everyday this week!

Meetings: Is Your Meeting Necessary?

Is there really a need to have a meeting? I mean, REALLY need one? Can the meeting objectives (if there are any) be accomplished through a memo, email, or a phone call to someone? When you schedule a meeting, it’s like you’re going to the organization and asking them to fund a project. Your asking people to set aside time and they only have so much to give. In the book Meeting Excellence, the first chapter is titled, “Is This Meeting Necessary?”. That IS the question! In Read Before Our Next Meeting, Pittampalli says that people can read, so send them a memo! People should do work BEFORE the meeting and make decisions AT the meeting.

Making a withdrawal from the ‘time bank’ of the company is a big deal. Have too many meetings and you might get someone laid off. 30minutes doesn’t seem like much. Multiply that times hundreds of employees who think the same and go ahead and schedule that meeting and that’s some serious time/money. Your bias should be to not have the meeting. In today’s meeting culture the bias is to have the meeting. And today’s meeting culture is killing us.

DO: Pick up the phone and call someone instead of having the meeting!

DO: Can you leverage some social media in the company to have the dialog, list a discussion forum, company twitter like tool?

Meetings: End on Time

Not that this has ever happened to you...

The meeting you’re attending over runs by 10-15 minutes, which impacts your next meeting, which means you miss stuff in the next meeting so you don’t get what’s going on so you re-ask about ground already covered, that impacts, so the meeting drags out longer than intended, which… and on it goes. Think dominos. One domino crashes into the effectiveness of the next.

It’s a respect thing. Over run a meeting and you’re impact other people and it’s not just me impacting you. It’s me impacting the 5 people in my meeting that impacts the five meetings their attending, which impacts the 25 people in all those meetings, etc.

Why do we over run meetings? TONS of reasons. Lots to talk about. Knotty problem. The guy that has an opinion on everything. Okay, so there’s more stuff to do – what else is new?? Manage it, don’t let it manage you.

Ending on time is about RESPECT.

Ending on time is about forcing DECISIONS.

You can always have another meeting or discuss via email those items you don’t get to.

Things you can do:

• Give a five minute warning before the end of the meeting, say, “Let’s do a time check, we have five minutes left. Let’s summarize the action items.”
• Give a 1 minute warning
• Have a parking lot for the stuff you can’t cover. More on the parking lot later.

Meetings: Start on Time

How often has this happened to you?

You’re on time for a meeting and the organizer is running 3-5 minutes late. When they finally do show up, they say, “we’ll give everyone else a few minutes to show up.” When the meeting finally does get started, it’s running 8-10 minutes late.

Those in the meeting made the effort to be there on time and they’re waiting. There’s a respect issue here: those on time made the effort to be there and their told to wait. Given the number of meetings that we have, this is also a productivity issue. Late means less time to get the work of the meeting done.

If you start late then people will think it’s okay to come in late. A 9:00am meeting can shift to 9:15. Then a 9:15 meeting gets rescheduled to 9:30 to accommodate folks. The organizer thinks that they need to change the time because people are coming late (because the organizer starts late).

DO: Be clear about the start time. Taken care of by electronic appointment systems, but if you’re emailing a group of people to meet at Panera’s resturant, it’ll be less clear.

DO: Start on time! You can start the meeting by saying, “The clock says it’s time to start, so I’d like to welcome you to the ….”.

DO: Start talking at the start time, even if people are still coming in or milling around.

DO: No one in the meeting? Start talking anyway.

DO: Are you a preacher? Start that service on time. Hundreds of reasons why: new people, kids, professionals – all kinds of implications. Just do it.

Will 1/3 of you please stand up and leave the room

Let's suppose you're running a meeting with, say, 30 people or more. You look around the room and see that 1/3 of the people are doing IM, email, surfing, doing the blackberry, etc. It's fairly easy to tell those from the people that are using their laptops to take notes. What can you conclude?

1. 1/3 of the people didn't need to be invited - you've got too many people there

2. You'll take a 1/3 hit on productivity, because you'll be explaining things again

3. You're agenda isn't resulting in action and the meeting is probably just the mutual sharing of profound ignorance.

Just getting people together face to face to 'just get this thing done' doesn't work, and getting 'everyone together' is usually a waste of time and resources unless they all walk away with action. Sure 'sharing' and 'getting everyone on the same page' has value, but at what cost?

If you're in a meeting, doing IM, email, blackberry, surfing, etc. it's not okay. It's unprofessional. It's rude. It's a waste of company resource. No, you can't effectively multi-task. No, you're not that important. You send the message that the other person's time is not valuable.

Standup Meetings

Coordination on a project team is really important - seems obvious right? One tool to getting there is to have a daily stand up meeting where each person gets 2 minutes or less to share the following:

• What have they accomplished


• What are the working on today


• What road blocks are they running into

First just knowing what each other are doing today is very helpful. I had frequent situations where someone will say, "you're working that? You may want to talk with Tom - he knows about that." Team members will raise questions that others can answer or there are situations that one team member doesn't even know what question to ask, but will get input. Team members also appreciate short meetings!

The key to the meeting is to keep it short and very crisp. How long depends on the size of the team meeting. I shoot for five to ten minutes. Everyone should have a minute or less. I've found that folks are usually around 15 seconds. There's always someone who goes over, but as the team has more of these, people settle into a rhythm.

Recommendations:

• Send out a recurring meeting notice. If the team all sit near each other, schedule a conference room. Meeting should run through the life of the project.


• Meeting is best held first thing in the morning. I have people in different time zones, so I schedule as early as possible for everyone. I give people a 1/2 hr to get into the office, get their coffee, check email, etc. Don't let time be the hang up. If people can't make it until 11:30am ET, then do that.


• Meeting notice example: "The purpose of this meeting is to keep other members of the team informed as to what you're doing and if you need help. Each person gets 1 minutes or less to cover the following: (1) what have you accomplished since the last meeting, (2) What are you working on today, (3) Are there any impediments preventing you from meeting your commitments, and (4) is there any time today or the rest of the week when you won't be available."


• If people are meeting in a conference room - everyone stands up


• I go first so I can model how the meeting should run. I find myself sometimes just asking for today's tasks and not contributing myself. Not good. I'm a part of the team as much as anyone else and have my share to carry.


• I take notes - not of everything everyone says, but key issues.


• Don't be afraid to use the phrase, "let's take that off line". I find that being specific helps, "Tom, can you and Al take that off line and let me know before next stand up?"


• It's easy to forget the meeting once it happens, but my work isn't done. I review the list of notes and follow up with people.

A great resource is the book, Death By Meeting by Patrick Lencioni. Very easy to read - it's a parable. It describes this approach along with some other meeting styles.

Silence is Golden

Was on a call with a group of directors reviewing a presentation for some set of functionality to be delivered and the discussion was heated and lively. At one point I IM'ed the technical lead and asked what she thought - she'd been pretty quiet. She sent back: with so many geniuses on the phone, I don't think I'd have anything of value to add ;-)

You know, the temptation is very high to jump in and share your mind. but sometimes it's just better to be quiet.

Virtual Calendars

Teams that don't work in the same location rely on tools like MS Outlook to setup meetings. The problem with tools like this is that it creates the illusion that I'm available whenever there isn't a meeting schedule, and beyond. People will schedule back to back meetings all day long, all week long and that's not good on productivity. In fact what starts to happen is that since there's no time to really get things done, people will schedule meetings to get things done. Don't have time to get that document done? They'll schedule a meeting with you and three other people to work on it. No wonder people hate meetings.

So here are some things I've found helpful:

You need time to get away from your desk - if you do this during lunch, create a recurring meeting for lunch. While there will be times when you'll need to schedule meetings during this time and you can negotiate as needed.

Some meetings require that you debrief - you need time after the meeting to review action items, summarize results, etc. If someone sends you an appointment for a meeting like this, schedule 15minutes after that so you'll have that time.

Sometimes a meeting needs prep time - 15 to 30 minutes to get ready. Schedule an appointment on your calendar to do this prep work.

You need time to do email. Email is another whole other set of blogs, so for the purposes of this discussion, let's just say that unless you're in customer service, you can't let it interrupt you all day long. Create yourself a recurring appointment to review email. I schedule 3, 1/2hr appointments each day to review email.

One of my team members has a tough commute in the morning which means that he gets in around 9:00 and he blocks that commute time out. The lesson here: be realistic - block it out if you aren't going to be there.

Block out family time. I've had people who scheduled meetings way after normal working hours. Your family comes first and you need to protect that time. In most situations I find that people respect non-core work hours and that this has only been a problem on occasion. All this ties into another discussion about how to communicate work practices - another couple blogs on this one!

I block out time on Friday to clean out my email box, review tasks for the week, and plan for the start of next week.

Really the burden is on me to manage my schedule (and you for yours). I've got to have time to do my work. We can't let the disorganization of other people create a crazy week for us.