Naomi Chavez, an internal consultant for Cisco Systems, one of Silicon Valley'due south leading network-equipment manufacturers, is frustrated: "Nosotros have the most ineffective meetings of any visitor I've ever seen."

Kevin Eassa, vice president of operations for the deejay division of Conner Peripherals, some other Silicon Valley giant, is realistically resigned: "We realize our meetings are unproductive. A consulting firm is trying to help us, and nosotros think they've hit the marking. But we've got a long way to go."

Richard Collard, senior managing director of network operations at Federal Limited, is simply exasperated: "We only seem to see and run across and meet and we never seem to practise anything."

Meetings are the most universal — and universally despised — function of business concern life. Just bad meetings do more than ruin an otherwise pleasant 24-hour interval. William R. Daniels, senior consultant at American Consulting & Grooming of Factory Valley, California, has introduced meeting-improvement techniques to companies including Practical Materials and Motorola. He is determined about the existent stakes: bad meetings make bad companies.

"Meetings thing considering that's where an organization's culture perpetuates itself," he says. "Meetings are how an organization says, 'You lot are a member.' So if every day nosotros get to boring meetings full of boring people, and then we can't help but call back that this is a boring company. Bad meetings are a source of negative messages most our company and ourselves."

It's not supposed to exist this way. In a business globe that is faster, tougher, bacteria, and more downsized than ever, y'all might expect the sheer demands of competition (not to mention the impact of e-mail and groupware) to curb our appetite for meetings. In reality, the opposite may exist true. As more work becomes teamwork, and fewer people remain to do the work that exists, the number of meetings is likely to increase rather than subtract. Jon Ryburg, president of the Facility Performance Group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is an organizational psychologist who advises companies on part pattern and "meeting ergonomics." He tells his clients that they demand twice as much meeting infinite as they did twenty years ago. The reason? "More than and more companies are team-based companies, and in squad-based companies almost work gets done in meetings."

A diverseness of tools and techniques (plus a healthy dose of common sense) can make meetings less painful, more productive, maybe even fun. There's likewise an important role for technology, although the undeniable ability of calculator-enabled meeting systems ordinarily comes with astronomical cost tags. All the same, in that location's lots to acquire from electronic "meetingware" fifty-fifty if you lot never purchase information technology. What follows is Fast Visitor's guide to the seven sins of mortiferous meetings and, more of import, seven steps to conservancy.

Sin #ane: People don't take meetings seriously. They make it late, leave early, and spend most of their time doodling.

Salvation: Prefer Intel's heed-set that meetings are real work.

There are as many techniques to better the "crispness" of meetings as there are items on the typical meeting agenda. Some companies punish latecomers with a penalty fee or reprimand them in the minutes of the meeting. But these techniques accost symptoms, not the disease. Disciplined meetings are most listen-set — a shared conviction amidst all the participants that meetings are real work. That all-besides-frequent expression of relief — "Meeting'south over, let's go back to piece of work" — is the mortal enemy of good meetings.

"Most people just don't view going to meetings as doing work," says William Daniels. "You have to brand your meetings uptime rather than reanimation."

Is there a company with the right listen-set? Daniels nominates Intel, the semiconductor manufacturer famous for its managerial toughness and well-baked execution. Walk into any conference room at whatsoever Intel manufactory or function anywhere in the earth and y'all volition see on the wall a poster with a serial of uncomplicated questions about the meetings that take place at that place. Do you know the purpose of this coming together? Do yous accept an agenda? Exercise you know your part? Do you lot follow the rules for adept minutes?

These posters are a visual reminder of just how serious Intel is about productive meetings. Indeed, every new employee, from the most junior production worker to the highest ranking executive, is required to have the company's home-grown course on effective meetings. For years the course was taught past CEO Andy Grove himself, who believed that good meetings were such an important function of Intel's culture that it was worth his time to train the troops. "We talk a lot about meeting subject area," says Michael Fors, corporate training manager at Intel Academy. "It isn't complicated. It's doing the nuts well: structured agendas, articulate goals, paths that you're going to follow. These things brand a huge difference."

Sin #2: Meetings are too long. They should accomplish twice as much in half the time.

Salvation: Fourth dimension is money. Track the toll of your meetings and use reckoner- enabled simultaneity to make them more than productive.

Almost every guru invokes the same rule: meetings should last no longer than xc minutes. When's the last time your visitor held to that dominion?

One reason meetings drag on is that people don't appreciate how expensive they are. James B. Rieley, director of the Heart for Continuous Quality Improvement at the Milwaukee Area Technical College, recently decided to modify all that. He did a survey of the college'south 130-person direction council to find out how much fourth dimension its members spent in meetings. When he multiplied their fourth dimension past their salaries, he adamant that the college was spending $3 meg per yr on direction-council meetings alone. Money talks: afterwards Rieley's study came out, the college trained 40 people as facilitators to keep meetings on runway. Bernard DeKoven, founder of the Found for Better Meetings in Palo Alto, California, has gone Rieley 1 step better. He's adult software called the Meeting Meter that allows any squad or section to calculate, on a running footing, how much their meetings toll. After someone inputs the names and salaries of meeting participants, the program starts ticking. Recall of information technology as a national debt clock for meetings.

DeKoven emphasizes that he created the Coming together Meter as a chat piece rather than as a serious direction tool. It's a visible way to put coming together productivity on the calendar. "When I use the meter, I don't merely talk about the cost of meetings," he says, "I talk about the cost of bad meetings. Because bad meetings atomic number 82 to even more than meetings, and over fourth dimension the costs get monumental."

Technology tin do more than than just keep meetings shorter. It can likewise increase productivity — that is, help generate more ideas and decisions per minute. I of the main benefits of meetingware is that it allows participants to violate the first rule of good beliefs in most other circumstances: look your plow to speak. With Ventana'southward GroupSystems V, the most powerful meeting software bachelor today, participants enter their comments and ideas into workstations. The workstations organize the comments and project them onto a monitor for the whole grouping to see. Most everyone who has studied or participated in computer-enabled meetings agrees that this capacity for simultaneity produces dramatic gains in the number of ideas and the speed with which they are generated.

Geoff Bywater, senior vice president of marketing and promotion for FoxMusic, recently organized a strategic retreat for the 170 top executives of 20th Century Fox Filmed Entertainment. He used a computer system supplied by CoVision, a San Francisco consulting house that specializes in technology-enabled meetings. Apple PowerBooks outfitted with customized software allowed participants to respond to questions, propose ideas, and vote on options — all at the same time.

"We had 170 of the brightest people in the company in one room," Bywater reports. "The claiming was, how much information and how many ideas could we get out of them? Fifty-fifty if we had divided into 15 breakout groups, we'd still accept but 15 people speaking at the same time. People were amazed. If we asked a question and each person typed in ii ideas, that'south nearly 350 ideas in v minutes! That was the biggest bear upon of the engineering science – the number of ideas generated in such a brusk fourth dimension."

Be warned, though: electronic meetings tin can exist more productive than traditional meetings, simply they're non e'er shorter. "The good news most calculator-supported meetings is that the discussions tend non to be repetitive or redundant," says Michael Schrage, a consultant on collaborative technologies and the writer of No More Teams!, an influential guide to group work and meetings. "The bad news is that the meetings can go longer. The reckoner-supported environment encourages people to discuss things a little more thoroughly than they might otherwise."

Sin #3: People wander off the topic. Participants spend more time digressing than discussing.

Salvation: Get serious about agendas and store distractions in a "parking lot." It's the starting point for all communication on productive meetings: stick to the agenda. But it'south difficult to stick to an calendar that doesn't exist, and most meetings in most companies are decidedly agenda-costless. "In the real globe," says Schrage, "agendas are about as rare equally the white rhino. If they do exist, they're about as useful. Who hasn't been in meetings where someone tries to prove that the agenda isn't appropriate?"

Agendas are worth taking seriously. Intel is fanatical near them; it has developed an agenda "template" that everyone in the company uses. Much of the template is unsurprising. An Intel calendar (circulated several days earlier a meeting to let participants react to and alter it) lists the meeting'due south cardinal topics, who volition lead which parts of the word, how long each segment will take, what the expected outcomes are, and so on.

Intel agendas also specify the meeting's decision-making fashion. The visitor distinguishes amid iv approaches to decisions: authoritative (the leader has full responsibility); consultative (the leader makes a determination after weighing group input); voting; and consensus. Being articulate and up-forepart nearly decision styles, Intel believes, sets the right expectations and helps focus the conversation.

"Going into the coming together, people know how they're giving input and how that input will become rolled up into a determination," says Intel'due south Michael Fors. "If you don't accept structured agendas, and people aren't sure of the decision path, they'll bring upwardly side issues that are related merely non directly relevant to solving the problem."

Of course, even the best-crafted agendas can't baby-sit against digressions, distractions, and the other foibles of human interaction. The challenge is to go along meetings focused without stifling creativity or insulting participants who stray. At Ameritech, the regional telephone company based in Chicago, meeting leaders employ a "parking lot" to maintain that focus.

"When comments come upward that aren't related to the issue at paw, nosotros record them on a flip nautical chart labeled the parking lot," says Kimberly Thomas, director of communications for small business services. But the parking lot isn't a black hole. "We always rail the upshot and the person responsible for it," she adds. "We use this technique throughout the company."

Sin #4: Naught happens once the coming together ends. People don't convert decisions into action.

Salvation: Convert from "meeting" to "doing" and focus on mutual documents.

The trouble isn't that people are lazy or irresponsible. It'due south that people go out meetings with different views of what happened and what'southward supposed to happen next. Meeting experts are unanimous on this point: even with the ubiquitous tools of organization and sharing ideas — whiteboards, flip charts, Mail service-it notes — the capacity for misunderstanding is unlimited. Which is another reason companies plow to figurer technology.

The best mode to avoid that misunderstanding is to convert from "meeting" to "doing" — where the "doing" focuses on the creation of shared documents that lead to action. The fact is, at near powerful function for technology is also the simplest: recording comments, outlining ideas, generating written proposals, projecting them for the entire group to see, printing them then people leave with existent-fourth dimension minutes. Forget groupware; just get yourself a expert outlining plan and oversized monitor.

"You're not merely having a meeting, y'all're creating a document," says Michael Schrage. " I tin't emphasize enough the importance of that distinction. It is the fundamental deviation between ordinary meetings and computer-augmented collaborations. Comments, questions, criticisms, insights should raise the quality of the certificate. That should be the group'due south mission."

In other words, the medium is the coming together. That'southward why Bernard DeKovan prefers computers to flip charts and whiteboards. "Flip charts create behaviors conditioned by the medium," he says. "People kickoff competing for room on the flip chart, the facilitator has to scratch thing out, and pretty soon you can't read what's on it. With a computer, you lot never run out of room for ideas, yous tin can edit indefinitely, you can generate hard copies for everyone at a moment's notice. It's a much richer medium."

Sin #5: People don't tell the truth. There's enough of conversation, but non much candor.

Conservancy: Cover anonymity.

Nosotros all know information technology's truthful: Likewise often, people in meetings simply don't speak their minds. Sometimes the problem is a leader who doesn't solicit participation. Sometimes a ascendant personality intimidates the rest of the grouping. Just most of the time the problem is a simple lack of trust. People don't feel secure plenty to say what they really think.

The most powerful techniques to promote candor rely on engineering, and almost of these computer-based tools focus on anonymity — enabling people to express opinions and evaluate alternatives without having to divulge their identities. Information technology's a sobering commentary on free speech in business — "Say what you retrieve, and nosotros'll disguise your names to protect the innocent" — but it does seem to piece of work.

Jay Nunamaker, CEO of Ventana Corporation, based in Tucson, Arizona, and a professor at the Academy of Arizona'south Karl Eller Graduate School of Direction, is a leading expert on electronic meetings. He says Ventana added anonymity to its software to see the needs of the U.S. military. "Admirals can really dampen interaction at a meeting," he notes. "But we didn't realize the impact it would have in corporate settings. Even with people who work together all the time, anonymity changes the social protocols. People say things differently." CoVision, the firm that facilitated the 20th Century Play a trick on meeting, provides a system that allows for anonymous voting and anonymous grouping conversations. Coming together participants enter comments onto laptops, and the comments are projected onto a screen without attribution. CoVision president Lenny Lind says the system is peculiarly powerful in meetings of high-ranking executives.

"People in the upper reaches of direction pay so much deference to the leader, and have and then much to lose, that conversations quickly get measured and political," he argues. "People but won't bare their souls. Anonymity changes that."

Only there are problems with anonymity. Some people like getting credit for their ideas, and anonymity tin can leave them feeling shortchanged. There are too opportunities for manipulation. Carol Anne Ogdin of Deep Wood Engineering science, a teamwork consultant and coming together facilitator based in Santa Clara, California, calls anonymity a "modest idea that'due south been blown out of proportion." In particular, she worries about gamesmanship – for example, people who build an anonymous groundswell of back up for their ain contributions.

Sin #6: Meetings are always missing important information, so they postpone critical decisions.

Conservancy: Get information, non only furniture, into meeting rooms.

Almost meeting rooms brand it harder to have skilful meetings. They're sterile and uninviting — and often in the middle of nowhere. Why? To aid people "concentrate" by removing them from the frenzy of office life. But this isolation leaves meeting rooms out of the data flow. Often, the downside of isolation outweighs the benefits of focus.

Computer-services behemothic EDS has congenital a ready of high-tech facilities that leave meetings participants awash in information. These much-heralded Capture Labs, electronic meeting rooms used by the company and its clients, may offer a glimpse of the meeting room of the hereafter.

The Capture Lab "is a self-independent information network," says Michael Bauer, a principal with EDS's management consulting subsidiary. "We can bring in information from the Net or from EDS's internal Web. We tin go data on stock prices, even about the atmospheric condition if nosotros're worried about shipping or travel. It'south brought into the room, displayed on a screen, and talked about."

It's not necessary to become that far. Jon Ryburg, the meeting ergonomist, offers a few ways to increase the "information quotient" in meeting spaces. For i thing, allow enough infinite in your meeting rooms for teams to store materials. Project teams generate lots more minutes and memos. Meetings build models, make full flip charts, create artifacts of all sorts – "information" that's vital to hereafter meetings. "People are constantly hauling materials to and from meeting rooms," Ryburg says. "It's much easier to but store things for later meetings."

William Miller, director of research and business evolution for Steelcase, the office-article of furniture manufacturer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, emphasizes that mobility is almost more than convenience. The radical redesign of work, he argues, requires a radical redesign of coming together infinite.

"Knowledge workers spend lxxx% of their fourth dimension at the office abroad from their desks," Miller says. "Where are they? Working on projects. The mode to support that work is to build project clusters and co-locate desks around them. You can mail service information and never take it down. We phone call it 'data persistence.' And we don't talk about meetings. Nosotros talk about 'interactions.' It's part of the new science of constructive work."

Sin #seven: Meetings never get improve. People make the same mistakes.

Conservancy: Practise makes perfect. Monitor what works and what doesn't and concord people accountable.

Meetings are like any other role of concern life: you lot go better but if y'all commit to it — and aim high. Charles Schwab & Co., the financial-services visitor based in San Francisco, has fabricated that delivery. In almost every meeting at Schwab, someone serves as an "observer" and creates what the company calls a Plus/Delta list. The list records what went right and what went wrong, and gets included in the minutes. Over fourth dimension, both for specific coming together groups and for the company as a whole, these lists create an calendar for change.

How much can meetings improve? The last word goes to Bernard DeKoven: "People don't take good meetings because they don't know what adept meetings are like. Skilful meetings aren't only nearly piece of work. They're nigh fun — keeping people charged up. It's more than than collaboration, it'southward 'coliberation' — people freeing each other up to think more than creatively."

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