According to an article at VNUnet, long and pointless meetings are the principal cause of anger in European offices.

“When ..control is lost through external events such as a rude boss, sitting in a pointless meeting or a printer jam that no one wants to fix, it doesn’t take much for the average office worker to snap. There is no doubt that office rage is on the increase, but a range of initiatives such as crisper meetings or interpersonal kindness could reduce stress levels and even extend the life expectancy of office equipment.’ Beresford recommended several tips for helping to reduce office rage, including cutting the length and frequency of meetings and ensuring a specific agenda.”

Reading that made me think that, although quite a few things drive me crazy, one thing that doesn’t is meetings.  The thing is that, although we have quite a lot of them, we’re quite disciplined and use our Workplace tools to help us.

Here’s our Best Practice on how to set up and conduct a meeting – straight out of Workplace..

Policy
All meetings or workshops must be effective and efficient. They must run on time, to an agenda and have the relevant people participating. The salient points to consider are:-

Arranging a Meeting

• All meetings at PlusNet should be booked in Meeting Manager. When booking meetings ensure that your intended attendees are not already booked in another meeting at that time.
• When raising a meeting in Meeting Manager ensure that the agenda is clear and that any preparation work that attendees are expected to carry out prior to the meeting is clearly defined in Meeting Manager, although it is the responsibility of all meeting attendees to be prepared and raise questions before the meeting if additional clarification is required.
• When selecting the duration of the meeting, always consider the length of time you are booking the meeting for. Do you really need to book the room for an hour? Often, a meeting will grow to fill the duration you have booked the room for, therefore try to minimize the length of time you book a room for and stick to the agenda throughout the meeting.
• Whenever you are invited to a meeting you should always question whether you are really required to attend. Has somebody else been invited that can attend on your behalf and update you later? If you feel you are not required, go speak to the person who arranged the meeting and arrange to have yourself taken off the list of attendees.

Conducting a Meeting

• The meeting chair should arrive at the meeting room 5 mins prior to the meeting starting in order to set up Meeting Manager and any other Workplace or required documents.
• The attendees should arrive a few minutes prior to the start of the meeting to get themselves settled and be ready to start promptly.
• The meeting chair should commence the meeting with a statement as to the aims of the meeting. This is to ensure that all parties are aligned to the same objective.
• The meeting chair should drive the meeting, ensuring that the agenda is stuck to and that none of the discussion goes off track. If discussion does go off track, the chair should encourage the distracted parties to arrange a separate workshop if necessary – including creating an action if deemed necessary.
• All agreed actions that arise from a meeting should be accountably added as tasks through Meeting Manager.
• All meetings should end 5 mins prior to the end of the booked period to enable the chair of any meeting following yours to prepare for his/her meeting.

After a Meeting
When exiting the meeting room, it is the chair’s responsibility to ensure that the lights and projector are turned off and that all cups, plates, paper and any other items are removed.

So, you see, if I don’t need to attend a meeting I can always send someone else 

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This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 7:16 pm and is tagged with Thoughts and is posted in the category Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.