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Tutorials: Out of Meetings and Into Results

Escape from unproductive meeting time with eRealize

Effective meetings offer important benefits...

...they can keep everyone informed and “in the loop”and provide a chance for executives, managers and everyone to get on the same page. They can serve to illuminate potential trouble early enough to avoid it, and provide a forum for the discussion and development of ideas.

But not all at once...

Problems arise when meeting are burdened with all of the above and more - especially when there is little time invested in preparing for the meeting. Meetings crammed with different topics, goals and information can get side tracked quickly.

The Costs: time, money, productivity and morale

When people loose interest in a meeting, or when one or two items monopolize time in a meeting with a full agenda, important items are often buried. It is not uncommon in such meetings for time to run out with important decisions left unresolved. Since time spent in unproductive meetings takes time from other things, it may end up as wasted time. Worse, people may begin to resent being forced to attend a meeting that offers them no little or no value. This in turn can curtail if not cut off their input and listening in the meetings -thereby ensuring that times is indeed wasted.

This article will explore some ways to reduce the time spent in meetings while making them more productive.

Understanding the needs that can help you avoid overwhelming meeting agendas

One of the major factors that can render meetings ineffective is cramming too much in to the agenda. The meeting should not be your only means for communication and collaboration, so let’s take a look at some of the needs that different roles bring to meetings. Executives need to

Gain visibility into overall progress and any trouble spots
Communicate direction, priorities and concerns that affect the organization

Managers need to

Gain visibility into progress on specific items
Ensure communication and collaboration within the team
Assess/discuss needs and next steps

“Knowledge Workers” need to

Raise issues and warning flags to obtain help
Get information and feedback on priorities
Provide input and insights into the execution of plans and strategy
Communicate progress
Set expectations

Often, the format for a meeting is to read off some quick notes, and then go around the table with updates.

Unfortunately, unless everyone in the meeting has invested time preparing, and there is a set of SMART goals for the meeting, meetings run the risk of becoming unproductive.

Cut Meeting Time by 88% Using Key Result Areas in eRealize

The remainder of this article will cover how to set up a Key Result Area so that you can use eRealize to automate meeting preparation and provide the visibility and communication that are often the goals of meetings.

Choose a meeting or two that you feel could use improvement. Before continuing take a few moments to consider

The goals of the meetings
How the meeting(s) is/are organized- are their certain categories of information?Is it organized around specific initiatives?

How-To: Setting the Stage

Summary: Set up a key result area that will serve to monitor items that relate to your meeting. Setting things up will take about 5-10 minutes.

Set up a Key Result Area to track things for your meeting

Log in to eRealize and go to the Strategy tab.
Click on Themes.
Locate the theme that encompasses Operations or the way you collaborate.
If you do not already have such a theme, you will need to create one. Try something like “Efficient Operations” that leaves no uncertainty as to why you have things like meetings in the first place.

Tip: 1)Remember, a theme expresses one of the broad, overall components of your strategy 2) If you do create a theme, be sure to organize under the appropriate group using the security tab, and by designating the right group as the owner.

Once you have set up or located this theme, create a new key result area.
The title should summarize the ultimate goal or vision for the meeting. Here are some examples from our customers.
- “Monitor weekly hotspots and priorities”
- “Key management priorities”
- “Staff project updates”
Enter a description that helps people understand what you hope to achieve with this key result area. For example:

“This key result area will be used to help automate collaboration as it relates to our weekly meetings. All items for discussion and monitoring within those meetings should be aligned with this key result area.”
Now set up categories according to the different types of information that is dealt with in the meeting. These can be initiatives, or things like “new action items” and “items from the previous week”. You can use categories to effect status or workflow if you don’t want to customize the activity fields for any reason.

Once you have set up the key result area, you are ready to align activities and projects.

Create a Report on activities by Key Result Area.

Locate "Create new report" on the Reports tab menu
Configure it to report on activities and
Organize by Key Result Area Category.
Leave the time period blank
Go the Columns tab, choose any columns you like
Use the Security tab to make sure evberyone in your meeting has access.
Use the Save tab to provide a meaningful name
Choose the folder in which you want to store your report
Click Finish

Tip: Run this report prior to each meeting - you can send people links or print copies to distribute

How-To: Aligning Things that Come Up with Your Meeting

Summary: items come up that relate to your meeting, use the following steps to align them.

For an existing activity, click "edit", for a new activity, enter the summary information
Go to the Themes tab
Select the theme that your key result area for the meeting is in
Select the key result area you set up for the meeting
Click "Finish"

You also might want to set up a folder to store reports for other meetings, as you can easily reuse the report by copying it and customizing for other meetings.

Automating meeting preparation

When action items come up at your next meeting, start entering them in eRealize and assign them to the appropriate people. You will likely come up with some refinements to your key result area categories as well.

Before the next meeting, start checking in with the people who have assignments using the comment facility. A day or two before the meeting you will also want to request progress updates from anyone who has not yet provided one. For activities, use the comment facility to request an update.

For formal project assignments, you can use the progress communication assistant under Reports>Progress Communications Detail to generate a reminder and collect progress using the assistant. Prior to the meeting, print enough copies of the report created above to distribute in the meeting.

In the meeting

At the next meeting, summarize what’s been done (accomplishments) and what’s open. Discuss what’s open in as much as you need to, and raise/capture any new to dos. Your discussion can now focus on making decisions, instead of collecting updates.

With everything being tracked in eRealize, you can also provide visibility at a high level for executives, while allowing them to drill into details and obtain more information as they need it. eRealize also provides tools to help executives and managers articulate and communicate goals and strategy, so again, this can cut down on meeting time.

Conclusion

The key is to have information updated in eRealize, and print up the results for each meeting. This will generally motivate people to keep their information up to date, which in turn will familiarize them with eRealize and the many benefits it can offer.