You attend a meeting that has a well-defined agenda, where ideas are shared, a few topics or so are discussed, progress on some items and/or projects is followed, but they seem to go nowhere. Did you experience or have been part of such a meeting? This is another common type of poorly executed meeting setting, and my article today will focus on an ideal solution for the same.
Last week, my article revolved around ensuring an agenda is created, shared, and circulated among its members and attendees. Upon receiving valuable feedback from one of the readers of the article last week, who is also a senior executive that I respect from one of the leading organizations, stating “Meetings without accountability is a recipe for disaster," I decided to write on that.
First things first, unless you have more than one person working on a task, project, or assignment, unless you have some meaningful information or an announcement that needs to be shared, and unless there are teams that work on projects that correlate and/or depend on one another, and finally, unless there are some decisions that need to be made, then don’t or avoid setting up a meeting. It is not only a waste of valuable resources (time and money), yet it can also demotivate many productive employees as a result. Furthermore, and from the learnings and experience of working from home (WFH) during COVID-19, you could also utilize digital technologies to undertake these meetings, be it via video conferencing tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, or even WebEx. A lot of cost and time will be saved as a result, needless to mention the focus that will be attained too.
So now you have a clear agenda (created, shared, and circulated in advance to all the attendees); however, you realize that these meetings do not have results, and the effectiveness is poor. What could possibly be the reason? Simply, no accountability!
No clear action, repetitive meetings discussing the same issues and topics, no deadlines agreed, and very poor quality work (if any) are some of the results that you will encounter in such meetings that have no clear assignment of tasks (accountability per se). Productivity among the members will be reduced, frustration and confusion will follow, projects will be missed or even delayed, and lastly, talented employees and members of the team may end up leaving the team, department, and/or organization altogether. A possible way to find out the effectiveness of the scheduled reoccurring meetings is by noticing whether the number of employees/members attending is decreasing, so as items and actions discussed in the previous meeting are not moving an inch but are repeated again during the meetings.
So how do you go about ensuring accountability? Simply, for every item/action discussed, assign someone to lead/follow up. Each of the items must have timelines, timeframes, and/or deadlines. A status on each of the items must be discussed at every meeting before it is removed or archived from the action list. Finally, the item/action must be followed up during every meeting to ensure status is tracked.
Meetings can be important and very productive. Meetings are a way of getting complex things that depend on more than one individual done. Every organization has many rooms created for conducting meetings. Just ensure the next time you get an invite for a meeting that a clear agenda is shared before hand, and during the meeting, ensure every discussion or action item has a clear individual responsible as an owner for it. Trust me, you will see and feel value.
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