Day: 21 March 2016

Dying of ‘death by meetings’? We’ve all had meetings where conversation runs at tangent from the important issues, people come unprepared, or there are people involved in the meeting who don’t really need to be there. The end result of these meetings it that they’re often a colossal waste of time.

This is not an exaggeration. The problem is prevalent enough that Harvard Business Review built a Meeting Cost Analyzer to help you find out approximately what your meeting costs in terms of lost productivity.

The problems which lead to derailed, sidetracked, and ineffectual meetings are often the result of a poorly designed and communicated agenda.

An effective agenda lets team members an attendees know what to bring, how to prepare, who has the floor and when, and what the takeaways will be when the meeting is finished. A well-designed agenda facilitates a team’s ability to address issues and problem-solve in the shortest possible time, and clearly identify who has responsibility of the action items, before leaving the meeting.

Agenda Kung-Fu

If you want to really exercise your acumen, we’ve laid out a pattern which will help you to streamline and accelerate the pace of your meetings. If you use the below workflow, your meetings will get shorter. The better you get at it, the faster you’ll be able to move through it. Just be consistent.

Put it all on the table: Before you even mention a meeting, get everyone’s aches and pains on the table. Go to each team member and get their roadblocks, issues, pending approvals, et cetera, and list it all out. Sort it based on importance and precedence: if it’s not critical and not holding something else up, can it for an email thread. (Honestly, how many meetings have you been in that could have been replaced by an email?)

Sort what’s there: Once you’ve eliminated anything that can be answered out of a meeting, look at the second tier of asks: those things which can be handled in a short, tactical huddle instead of a strategic meeting. If the answer someone needs can be arrived at in a problem-solving session, or by getting the right people in the room, make it a small meeting with only the required people. Get those out of the way before you inconvenience team leads and other managers with bigger meetings. These smaller meetings, or groups of smaller meetings, are a great opportunity for recurring weekly or monthly half-day planning sessions and huddles.

Invite the key players: It’s a short rule… “If someone doesn’t need to be in a meeting, don’t invite them.” It seems like an obvious rule, and one many people try to follow, but it’s one that gets broken all the time. Often we invite people because we want them to feel included, or because they may present a fresh perspective – this can be good for envisioning meetings, depending on your industry – but more often than not you’re only adding time and confusion to a meeting. If an attendee doesn’t play a critical role in the meeting, or doesn’t possess some unique skill, expertise, or perspective the other members lack, (or the thing being discussed isn’t their direct responsibility) don’t waste your time or theirs. Leave them out of the meeting.

Keep it timely: It’s the chair’s responsibility to keep the show moving. The chair needs to be empowered to cut people off without hurting people’s feelings (and this needs to be established by the leadership from Day 1). Establish a neutral sign for telling someone to wrap it up. This can be a hand gesture, a light knock on the table (like signalling a ‘stay’ in poker), or even holding up a card. If any one person talks for longer than 60 seconds and they’re not communicating valuable, actionable information: cut it off, summarize their point, and move on.

Recap, recap, recap – Use the Rule of ‘W’: What may be the most powerful question you can ask in a meeting, in terms of efficiency. If you’re focused on GSD (Getting S#$% Done), send the following out a week before your first meeting, and send an After-Action Email following every meeting thereafter going forward.

1. What’s good? – What were the big wins? Are you on time? On budget?
2. What’s bad? – What big thing didn’t get done, what failed, or what needs fixing?
3. What’s at risk? – Is there a looming deadline? Is a client about to walk?
4. What did we get done last period/meeting? – Or, get the small stuff out of the way. Use this as a checklist to measure progress.
5. What are we doing this week/now? – What needs to get done for the bigger above items to move forward?
6. What decisions/approvals are outstanding? – Has everything been signed off on? Is the decision maker on the call/in the room? Why not?
7. What stands in the way? – See above. If it hasn’t been addressed by the time you get to this point, it’s likely something you’re waiting on from someone else. Usually sub-trades, contractors, service providers, or business partners. What is the shortest path to clearing these roadblocks?

Note: The above isn’t just for project meetings or committee decisions… The ‘Rule of W’ process is absolutely relevant to design meetings. Good design is not smoke and mirrors; it is iterative, solution-oriented, audience-aware problem solving. Design is almost never right on the first try [when it is, reward the person who designed it]. Good design is artisanal, and it depends on smart people applying active listening, adjusting for fit, and stakeholders providing meaningful feedback which takes into account the business objectives. Your designers absolutely need to be in on design meetings.

Define Ownership: Once you’ve given a good run-through of the ‘Rule of W’, in the order listed above, lay out who’s responsible for each of the action items by the next meeting. Set a deadline for early response, and follow-up dates. For example: if you’re waiting on a service install by a partner before the next thing can get underway, identify whose responsible for confirming the dates, troubleshooting for completion, and follow-up once it’s done so the other team members know to start their tasks.

After-Action Email: Make sure that you capture the above in an email and it goes out to everyone who was in attendance. That way they can share it with their reports and subordinates as an FYI, or for the purposes of delegating smaller tasks when they need help. It should be skim-able. Keep it short. Bullets are best. (See below for an example email.)

Review for success: Before you leave your meeting, every meeting ask ‘What worked and what didn’t?’ Taking 3-5 minutes to review and identify what is working, what isn’t and who does/doesn’t need to be in the next meeting will help you shave valuable meeting time and let people get on with doing their jobs.

After Action Email

Here’s a sample after-action email for a meeting addressing the brand rollout and office expansion for an industrial services company.

Brand Meeting After Action Email (03/19/2016)
Fr: dmatthews@somecompany.net
To: project-team@somecompany.net
Cc: leadership@somecompany.net

Hello ladies and gents. Here’s the AAE for today’s meeting. Next follow-up is next Thursday at 10:30 am. Same attendees.

Good: Selected printer for letterhead and business cards, go-ahead on design of new brand website, and estimates received from designers for fleet vehicle wraps.
Bad: Costs are +10% higher on vehicle signage due to USD change.
Risk: Designers don’t have template for new Nissan cargo van, recommend hold off on acquisition of those vehicles until templates received from Nissan.
Last Period: Put out RFQ for letterhead/documentation design, close logo design, and receive fleet agreements.
This Period: Proceed with Ford fleet agreement and vehicle wraps (David). Sign-off on pending new office lease, and signage install (Bryan).
Pending Approvals: New office hiring documentation (Amanda). Budget and operating line for new office furnishing, equipment, and payroll (Janice).

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If you’ve got regular meetings you’re committed to and need a secure, private location with ample free parking, accessible to downtown Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, and New Westminster, give Deeley Exhibition a call. We offer half-day, full-day, and evening bookings for our meeting room.

One of the most frequent questions we encounter about our meeting room facility is cost: “What am I paying for, and why does it cost what it does?”

This question isn’t unique to us, and it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Many meeting planners are trying to find room in their belts to take care of the costs of doing business while watching the budget.

While we do our best to address questions, inevitably this is one area where people always want to know a little more. We’ve decided to proactively provide more detailed answers about our fee structure, and a case example unique to one business.

Before you ask ‘Why does this cost so much?’, it’s important to consider the elements that make up the total package and contribute to the fee. As the organizer, it’s also good to visit what your meetings are attempting to accomplish so you can organize for greatest return-on-effort (RoE).

À-la-Carte vs Package Deals

We’re big believers in providing à-la-carte pricing instead of a rigid package. The reasons for this are simple:

1. Packages are often more expensive than required.
2. They don’t fit many people’s needs.

The average hotel meeting package tends to be based on a meeting of a dozen people and is a full-day booking. This routinely costs around $80-100 per head, and the package is just that – a package. You don’t save anything for services you don’t use. If you need to present to the group, these packages usually only come with a clipboard; you have to pay extra for use of a projector or audio-visual equipment (usually an extra $5-10 per head).

Many hotel meeting facilities are dependent on the food services that come in the packages, because that’s where they make their money. They include continental breakfast, lunch, and coffee service, but they expect you to eat in the hotel. Some hotels offer excellent cuisine, but many don’t: this doesn’t leave you a lot of options if you want to use your own caterer, or take into account entertaining business guests and visiting speakers at area restaurants.

Unless the facilities have been recently renovated, many hotel meeting and conference rooms look like the set of a Molly Ringwood film. Hotels that do have renovated facilities charge commensurately higher fees for their meeting packages. You could be looking at put to $120 per head if you commit to a package.

Furthermore, if the hotel is anywhere in the Metro Vancouver core, daily parking can cost upwards of $35 a day per vehicle, with some parking lots being $17.50 for the first hour! How much of those transportation and meeting costs does your company commit to paying?

It’s not just a matter of cost. What if you don’t need a full-day booking? A big part of the real expense of off-site meetings is the lost opportunity cost in having your entire senior management team, or team leads, participating in training and closed-door meetings. Efficient use of time is as important as is the economy of your options.

We offer half-day bookings for our meeting room, and services are à-la-carte: you only pay for what you use. If you’re only looking for a half-day, with coffee service, you’re only committed to the room rental and $30-35 per head. For thirty people that’s a fee of $1750, instead of the $2400 if you went with a hotel package. Our facilities are fully-equipped with premium A/V equipment and are professional, clean, modern, and brightly lit.

RoE: Recurring vs Full-Day Meetings

While you’re weighing the costs of your meeting, consider holding your meetings as more frequent, recurrent meetings rather than quarterly full-day meetings. Since 2010, charge-out rates for professional services have continued to rise.

This is all about RoE: consider the cost of having your senior resources tied up in meetings when they could be more efficiently engaged in working.

Let’s take the example of a project management firm: Charge-out rates for experienced project managers range between $175-$350 an hour; split the difference and call it $225/hr. If you’ve got 30 project management professionals engaged in a meeting for eight hours that’s a whopping $54,000 a day in lost productivity.

If you’re only holding meetings every three months, chances are there’s a lot to cover, and the more bodies that participate, the higher the chance exists that questions and discussions will slow the pace. It may end up taking you three or four days to get through all the relevant topics. These types of meetings are routinely held so that the executive and management teams are able to get on the same page.

If you’re able to hold smaller management meetings bi-monthly (for example: a half day every other Friday) and keep the checkins between teams more frequent, you’ll not only be able to get through the quarterly meetings more quickly, but you’ll likely also get ahead of any risks before they get to the level where the executive team needs to engage.

You benefit by having lower overall meeting expenses, improved communication, and lower lost opportunity cost; by keeping the highest bill members out of unnecessary meetings and discussions you free them up to focus on driving value and strategy.

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The Deeley Benefit

We are able to accommodate business meetings, lectures, and seminars for up to a hundred people in our meeting space, and we benefit from being close to restaurants and lounges for entertaining business prospects, guests, and dignitaries. We have relationships with several high-profile caterers as well.

Deeley Exhibition centre has ample free parking, is conveniently located adjacent Highway 1, and is accessible by transit. We are fully accessible and wheelchair friendly.