Think about the regular meetings that your organisation holds. Do they achieve what you set out to do, OR is it possible that your company suffers from meeting-itis or meeting constipation?
Meetings are not always as effective as we perceive them to be, and often, they can be a viable alternative to work.
In this video, I present five key points that you can follow, to ensure that you're conducting effective meetings.
Keep these steps in mind when trying to achieve effective meetings:
1. Frequency.
The first step is to establish how often you should you hold a meeting. This needs to be appropriate to your organisation.
As an example, your management review meeting and safety committee meeting should be monthly, but toolbox talks should be weekly (or even daily if you are in a high-risk industry).
2. Time Frame
Nobody wants to be sitting in a meeting for hours, let’s make them short and sharp and effective.
You need to determine how long you're going to allocate for your meetings PRIOR to them commencing.
If you can’t cover certain topics in an hour, there’s something wrong.
3. Good Agenda - Current Items, and new items.
A good agenda is critical. On that agenda, only have current actions that you need to do, have the important key points that you want to address, and any new actions that you have to do.
Don’t carry over old actions and talk about those. They shouldn’t even be on there.
4. Allocate Responsibility (target, date, for)
It's crucial that you allocate responsibility to the tasks on the agenda.There is no point discussing the actions to be taken, without someone being responsible for them.
When allocating responsibility, you need to think about who the task should be assigned to, the time frame they have on it, and a target date for completion.
5. Communication
This step is the key. Make sure that the minutes of these meetings are communicated to those staff that need to hear that information.
If anyone was absent during the meeting, it's crucial that you have a way to communicate what was discussed.
If you agree or disagree with any of the discussion points in this video, just leave some comments below. I’d really like to read them.
Check out my other blogs or YouTube videos for more HSEQ, IMS and Compliance Topics.