Archive for the ‘Meeting Skills’ category

I’ve written a few posts over the years Evaluating Meetings, Planning a meeting using PPO and Leading Meetings Effectively. Meetings are a fundamental part of business life, whether you are a small company or a large international organisation, meetings are intended as a way of communicating, sharing information, decision making and as a vehicle for perhaps delegating tasks that need to be done. This post is meant to go some way to answer the question; What’s causing unproductive meetings in our working environment today?

Meetings take up a considerable amount of our time, but for most organisations the actual ‘cost’ of meetings is simply lost or never thought about in real terms. Have you ever stopped to work out the actual cost to the organisation of a meeting? The next time you’re sitting in a meeting, take a moment to work out an estimate of the cost to the organisation. Think about how much time is being spent. Think about the average salary sitting round the table or “on the call”. Think about the loss of productivity whilst people are in the meeting. Or maybe think about the “loss of potential customer contact” whilst you’re in the meeting. In this technological age where teleconferences and video conferencing is becoming more prevalent, providing new distractions and opportunities to not focus on the task at hand.

The truth is that many meetings that you attend are about as useful as a chocolate teapot is for making tea. (Mind you, you can always eat it!)

» Read more: What’s causing unproductive meetings?

Further to our earlier posting 20 Tips for Managing Time, Here are 20 more tips to help you be more effective in the way that you plan you day, week, month year.

TiMe Management is one of those topics that we can all find difficult to address at times. Am I perfect at managing my time or planning my day, no I’m not, but I do use the tools and tips below to help plan my day and manage my time more effectively. The key to changing most behaviour is awareness, so be aware of when you’re not effectively using your time, and then do something about it!

So to help you, pure and simple here is a list of 20 tips for managing time and setting yourself up for a productive day.

» Read more: 20 more tips for Time Management

Do you regularly plan, organise or lead meetings either with your team or clients? Do you want a way of leading meetings effectively?

If so, below you will find some top tips for leading meetings effectively to ensure that you are getting the maximum value from everyone that is present. After all, meetings are an expensive use of everyone’s time, so make them effective, make them work for you and your team.

» Read more: Leading Meetings Effectively

Essential Meeting Skills

How frustrating is it when your meetings don’t run to time?

How frustrating is it when you receive an invitation to a meeting and it’s not clear what will be discussed or the purpose of the meeting is not clear?

Well, if you use three little letters when planning a meeting or asking questions about the meeting you will be able to gain this much needed clarity.

The three letters are P P O and they stand for;

» Read more: Planning a meeting – Use PPO!

Do you struggle to say no to requests for your time?

Do you drop whatever you’re doing to help others despite having deadlines?

If the answer to the two questions above was yes, then you will probably benefit from these approaches for saying No more effectively.

» Read more: Being Assertive: Approaches for saying No….

Do you enjoy giving presentations or doing 60 second introductions at networking events? If your response is no, you’re not alone!

» Read more: Powerful Presentation Delivery Tips #1

Meetings seem to always be a hot topic of conversation on the web with quite a few comments on Twitter and other platforms about how dire they are etc. All this chatter got me thinking about some of the meetings that I had been in that had been well run and then some of the meetings that had ‘lost there way’ and not been very successful at all. Meetings are expensive and time consuming, yet we don’t often think about how much meetings are actually costing our businesses. How often have you stopped to think about the actual value that your meetings create? Of even if they were actually necessary in the first place. That then led me to start thinking about how we could be Evaluating Meetings from now on?

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» Read more: Evaluating Meetings – Meeting Nightmares!

It is always difficult to tackle negative behaviour in a positive way that corrects the issue without causing resentment and / or damage to the relationship.

The BIFF model is one of the simplest and most effective ways of guiding your approach to the situation that I have come across.

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» Read more: Challenging Negative Behaviour