As I read the meeting manifesto by Al Pittampalli, Read This Before Our Next Meeting (now available to read for free from Amazon), I noticed many similarities between what Pittampalli writes and what Greg has been advising clients for years. Mainly, that there is a high cost to inefficient and ineffective work practices.
Anyone working in corporate America will be able to relate to the book, and, hopefully, learn from it. For us at McCulley/Cuppan, the focus is, as always, on how those in biomedical R&D can improve work practices.
Below are a few highlights from the book that relate to what we consider best practices (bolded text is quoted from the book).
The Modern Meeting moves fast and ends on schedule.
"Traditional meetings seem to go on forever, with no end in sight." How often have you felt this way? And how often do these meetings accomplish the intended purpose of the meeting, if there was a clearly stated purpose?
What we've seen over the years is that review meetings, those scheduled to discuss a document in person, last for hours, going from page 1 to page n through a document, with hours wasted on word choice and often leaving the author feeling overwhelmed. When the time limit is up on this type of meeting, more meetings are scheduled that will follow the same pattern.
The Modern Meeting limits the number of attendees.
More often than not, executives are involved in these document review meetings, even on meetings focused on editing and not strategic review, along with anyone who ever had anything to do with the project. How many man-hours are wasted sitting in a meeting instead of working on discovery or development? As Greg mentioned in his post "Editing When You Should be Reviewing Costs Serious Money", "when all
the hidden costs associated with review are added in, the cost-per-page
to produce a final version document becomes significant."
Meetings should be scheduled for a set amount of time, a time limit that is short enough to prevent repetitive attacks on one word or phrase (nitpicking), but long enough to actually allow for the goal of the meeting to be accomplished. Only the people who are directly responsible for a decision or must act on that decision should be in the meeting. Just because a person provided a line of text to the document does not mean that they should attend the meeting. If a person feels they must be included, provide them with a meeting outline and/or a meeting recap.
The Modern Meeting rejects the unprepared.
Often meetings are scheduled to review a draft of a document, but the meeting ends with only a few pages of that 100 page document having been marked up. Then more meetings are scheduled and the cycle continues.
Meetings should have a clearly defined purposed. If a meeting has a clearly declared purpose, the leader of the meeting should be able to provide a list of items to accomplish for the meeting and the time allotted for each action item. This helps the scheduler of the meeting weed out people whose presence is unnecessary. This also ensures everyone is prepared for the meeting. According to Pittampalli, if you aren't prepared, you shouldn't attend.
The Modern Meeting produces committed action plans.
At the end of a well-organized meeting, there should be a committed action plan, not just a deadline. Too often with our clients we've seen meetings that produce reams of notes for the authors of the document with a deadline that keeps moving as more notes are piled into the author's inbox.
If meetings, and work practices in general, are efficient and focused only on the contributions of those directly involved, there is less opportunity for circular arguments and nitpicking and less contradictory comments for the author to wade through. Plus there is more time to actually work.
For more tips on improving meetings, follow Al Pittampalli on Twitter at @Pittampalli or view his blog.
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