Why internal meetings matter

If you feel your internal meetings suck and are boring, and are not effective, then this is the episode for you.

Communication in a business is essential. If you want to improve the communication in your business, then what you have to do is make sure that your internal meetings are absolutely perfect.

And in this episode, I want to share some of the things that I believe are essential to making sure that your internal meetings aren’t boring and a waste of time, but something actually useful, keep people focused and help your business perform better.

If you want more practical ideas to help you improve your business overall, you can find plenty of tools and resources from Marco Soares.

A bit of perspective on team meetings

So, before we get started, a bit of perspective.

When it comes to team meetings, it’s really important that you take some time to acknowledge the fact that there is a lot of overhead sitting around a table in a meeting. And if you don’t make the best use of the time, then you are wasting a lot of time and a lot of money. So there’s quite a lot at stake.

Now that’s not to say that meetings shouldn’t take place. They should. But we don’t want them to overrun. We don’t want them to be unfocused. We don’t want the wrong conversations to happen in those meetings. We don’t want meetings to be something that people dread. We want meetings to be something that actually helps people do their jobs properly.

So how do you actually create these conditions in the first place?

Tip one: Have the right conversations in the right meetings

So my first tip is to make sure you have the right conversations happening in the right meetings in the first place.

Often, businesses will have weekly meetings and daily meetings. The purpose of those daily and weekly meetings should be to drive performance. It should be to understand what the priorities are, to understand what the challenges are in achieving particular KPIs. It should all be about performance and accountability.

And sometimes what happens is that those daily and weekly meetings get hijacked by big conversation topics, strategic conversations, big discussion points. And often that means that the performance issues don’t get the time that they need. And then people walk out of that meeting without the information and the focus that they need. Instead, they walk out having had a semi-interesting conversation with probably half the information that they require to make any form of decision.

Now, what we’re trying to avoid is that situation happening for you. Make sure that you have the right conversations in your various meetings.

The worst place to have a strategic conversation is in a weekly team meeting or in a daily huddle. Those big strategic conversations should happen once a month, probably at an off-site meeting.

Equally, you shouldn’t be talking about the day-to-day stuff in strategic meetings.

So, one of the things that’s very important for you to understand is what is the purpose of the various meetings that we have in our business and what conversations should take place in those meetings. Be strong on that and be clear, and that will improve the overall effectiveness because you’re not going to get bogged down by having pointless conversations or conversations that aren’t right for that meeting and for the people around the table.

If you find this content useful and want to see more of it, then please like, follow, subscribe or connect depending on where you are watching. You can also subscribe to my content on my YouTube channel to keep up with new episodes.

If you want to go deeper on this idea of making meetings truly effective, you might also find the number one thing you must do to improve internal meeting effectiveness helpful.

Tip two: Have a proper agenda for every meeting

Tip number two is to have a proper agenda for every single meeting that takes place in your business.

Your weekly team meeting should have a specific agenda with a specific set of agenda points that get run through and reviewed every single week. And there should be a little bit of space for any other business, but the focus should be set out in advance.

Your weekly sales meeting should have a specific weekly sales meeting agenda.

As many of your agendas as possible need to be routine agendas. The point of these agendas is to keep everybody focused and having the right conversations in the first place.

If you don’t have agendas for all of your meetings, then that’s when drift starts to creep in. That’s when the wrong conversations start to take place.

Make sure that you have agendas and that each of the agenda points has a specific time allocation to keep people focused and brief.

Good agendas make meetings useful. They make sure that they move at the right pace. They make sure that they finish on time. Having agendas is essential for effective meetings.

If you want more structure around this, you might like my thoughts on how to run an effective meeting, which builds on the same principles.

Tip three: Use a simple “who, what, when” system

Tip number three is that you need a who, what, and when. You need something to be able to record the actions that take place off the back of a meeting.

Most meetings will involve discussions, agreed actions, things that people need to go and look into and things that people need to do. You need a methodology, a system to be able to capture those actions.

If you don’t, then what you will find is that you get to the next meeting and nothing has progressed.

What we are trying to do is make sure that meetings are effective. One of the secret ingredients to making sure that your meetings are effective is by making sure that people actually get things done that they’ve agreed to in the first place.

So, using a very simple tool like the who, what, when helps you keep track of the specific actions and then what you should do is in the next meeting look at the actions that haven’t been implemented and ask the relevant person what they need to do over the next meeting to make sure that they catch up.

This is a really important point. If your meetings don’t result in actions, don’t result in discussions and decisions, then it’s kind of like, well what is the point of that meeting in the first place?

If you would like a copy of my who, what, when, just follow the link in the comments, and I’ll send one over to you.

Tip four: Agree on your meeting etiquette

Right, my next tip is to agree on your meeting etiquette for your business.

I think it is really important that everyone has a clear understanding of what is acceptable and not acceptable in your meeting.

So, for example, are people supposed to have phones in meetings? Is it okay for people to answer emails in meetings? Is it okay for people to be interrupted when they are in a meeting? Is it okay for people not to follow through on the actions that they’ve agreed to?

Whatever it is for you, you and your team must sit down and have a conversation about how you want to behave, what is acceptable, and those things need to be documented. That is what forms the standards for your meetings.

Personally, I think that meetings should start and start on time, no matter what. I don’t think people should have devices in the room unless they are essential to the conversation being had in the meeting. I think that agenda points should be flagged up in advance.

I think if you’ve agreed to do something off the back of the meeting that there’s an expectation that you actually do it or that you communicate well in advance that you’re not going to be able to do it, but you are working on it and it will be completed by X date.

Good habits, good meeting discipline result in effective meetings that don’t drone on for hours and bore everybody to death.

I think getting your meeting etiquette sorted as a business is really important and actually a very healthy thing for you to do.

Tip five: Make sure meetings are properly chaired

And my final tip is to ensure that you have effective chairing taking place in all of your meetings.

It’s hard to chair a meeting. It’s hard to keep people on track. It’s hard to say to somebody, Get to the point. It is hard to do that, but it is even harder to listen to somebody drone on time after time and see all of the energy being sucked out of your meetings.

One of the things that you can do to help everybody understand how important it is, and also to help everyone understand how challenging it can be, is to share the chair. Select a different chairperson who is there to make sure that the meeting runs on time, that it sticks to the relevant points, and that it achieves the purpose and the outcomes that the meeting was set out for in the first place.

If you can do that, then that will help that meeting move along, and it won’t give everybody that horrible sinking feeling of, oh, not another 15, 20 minutes on this thing. That’s what you want in your various meetings.

Summary: Five essentials for amazing internal meetings

So, in summary, if you want amazing meetings to take place, you need to make sure that you have the right conversations in the right meetings.

To help you decide on what the right conversations are, you need the right agendas, timed agendas for every single meeting. And those agenda points need to be routine, really, for each specific meeting.

The next thing that you want to do is make sure that you have a mechanism for capturing actions and following up on actions. A who, what, when, in my view, is one of the best things that you can use for this.

The next thing that you want is to agree as a team on what the etiquette is for all of your meetings. What’s acceptable? What’s not acceptable? What are the rules? What are the standards? And make sure that those are documented and that they are followed up on and policed by the chairperson in the meeting.

And finally, the chairperson needs to make sure that they chair the meeting properly, that they take control of that meeting, that they make sure that any waffle is managed, anybody sliding off topic is brought back to the topic and that the actions are collected and the timing is stuck to.

Do all of that, and your meetings will transform the effectiveness of your business.

Meetings are essential. We all recognise that we need good communication in our businesses, and meetings are one of the best mechanisms for you to be able to do that.

So, what do you need to do to improve the effectiveness of your meetings? Which of these five areas do you need to pay the most attention to? And what are you going to do about it over the next couple of days?

See you next time on Mind Your Own Business.