Ice Breaker in meetings

Ice breaker plays a significant role in meeting and helps to break down the barriers. An effective ice breaker will warm up the meeting conversation, reinforce the topic of the session, and make participants enjoy meeting each other.

Most of participants would like to start up their meeting with laughter and appreciate to do sharing in a comfortable environment. Hereby, I share some funny question of ice breakers from website and hope you can get some elicitation from them.

 

1. If your workplace was a tree, what kind of a tree would it be and why?

2. If you woke up tomorrow as an animal, what animal would you choose to be and why?

3. If you could live anywhere on this planet, and take everything that you love with you, where would you choose to live? Tell the group about your choice.

4. If you were to change your name, what would you change your name to? Why?

5. Are you spring, summer, fall, or winter? Please share why.

6. What's your favorite material object that you already own?

7. What item, that you don't have already, would you most like to own?

8. If you were to create a slogan for your life, what would it be? (Example: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, we all die.)

The icebreakers engage participants at the beginning of conversation and ensure they stay in the comfort zone. If you make your participants uncomfortable, then your icebreakers for meetings will fail. Try to get to know you icebreakers for meetings. Once ice breakers break the ice, discussion flows comfortably.

Making a success performance review meeting

Most of companies will do the performance appraisal in the middle of year and end of year. But many of managers, team leaders and supervisors struggle with how to ensure that the performance review meetings are motivational for the employee, especially for unsatisfied performers.

I used to fail to conduct effective performance review with my staff and I spent three hours but still couldn't convince my staff to accept the appraisal grade. I felt so tired and lost patient to continue it that day. I gave a day for my staff and me to cool down and research "star" in her performance of evaluation period (STAR: Specific, Time, Action, Result). After that, we sat down again to do performance review and reached agreement of score. From this case, I learned that good preparation of review meeting is very important and how to ensure to meet employee’s motivational needs.

Employee's motivational needs

·         A fair and objective review

·         A two-way discussion

·         When my viewpoint is listened to and valued

·         Not just about performance – it’s about my development and job satisfaction

·         A chance to review my objectives

·         Resulting in a clear plan of action

 

Preparation

·         Pre-information-collection by manager and employee

·         Crafting performance meeting agenda including: Opening, performance review by objective, new objective setup, employee development plan and career plan, job satisfaction discussion.

 

Ending and follow up

·         Reviewing and summarizing the evaluation outcomes and agree to the next steps

·         Regular review, feedback, and coaching

·         Action items following up and new objects set up

 

Generally, performance review is a cyclic process -  manager and staff need to go through review-update-review process. If you just conduct appraisal meeting with your staff one time per year, the meeting will fall into argument or ineffective situation.

Facilitation Techniques of Meeting

What is facilitation, why it's important?

Facilitation is the act of helping groups to focus their energies in a common direction, helping them to make better decisions in cooperation with one another. 

Facilitation is important because groups are typical more complex than we think they are. 

 I would like to share three great videos which state the tools and methods for effectively facilitating a meeting logically and comprehensively. Presenter, Daniel Saaty, CTO of Decision Lens, discusses the tools necessary to run a successful meeting. Saaty has many years of facilitation experience and these videos will provide techniques to facilitate your very own session.

I screen the key points from video as below from the videos.  

If you are interested in the detail of videos, please visit below links from YouTube.

Handling conflict in meeting

 

Conflicts in meetings can be a double-bladed sword which is disruptive or helpful. In fact, sometimes conflict can be the quickest and best way to make creative progress. However, if the person continues past the point of disagreement to the point of disruptiveness, meeting chair should take action to control it. Below is a list of conflict resolution tactics that you can use for meetings that get "out of control".

Preventing

·         Ground Rules - set up ground rules and get agreement at the beginning of meeting

·         Emphasizing the Team - Let everyone know the goals are owned by  team instead of individual

·         Listening - Sometimes listening identifies a need for problem solving. To be open for conflict and show respect for everyone.  Everyone will be invited to contribute, so that one person cannot take over the discussion.

Controlling and Resolving

·         Stay Calm - Give a few minutes for participants to calm down and defer the subject to later in the meeting to handle

·         Empathy - Express your understanding but make a fair decision

·         Ask questions and seek solution - Ask question to monitor team focusing on research and solution instead of arguments

·         Record the Discussion - Meeting minute is an objective document to prevent any twist. Outsiders can rely on it to make judgment.

·         Depersonalization - When conflict rises, team should focus on "what" is the argument instead of "Who" rise different opinion

·         Taking things offline - When the conflict can't be resolved in the meeting, either time limit or sensitive personal issues, chair need to record the argument and reschedule another meeting to solve it.

Proper preparation is useful to avoid conflicts in meetings. It's particularly important to make sure your expectations match what the group is capable of handling. Know yourself, and your team, well enough so that you can foresee  tensions that may exist between people and have strategies in place to deal with them.

 

How to lead productive project meetings

A Project Meeting is a regular event that involves stakeholders and key functions to generate group decisions  and take actions that contribute to quicker project delivery, according to the planned goals and expected results. Normally, it will be a series of meeting sections and sustain for a period,  instead of one-time meeting.

There are three key stages in project meeting: a) Kick-off meeting; b) Follow-up meeting; c) Announcement of final outcome. Personally, I think kick-off meeting is the most important stage which is the first meeting of the project where you give all the team members good news that project is ‘go ahead’ from the sponsors and also set the tone of your project – is it going to be a success or a failure.

Kick-off meeting

Primary kick-off meeting should make preparation similarly with normal meeting including a) setting goal; b) project team member and responsibility; c) project assumption; d) initial project plan; e) key milestones; f) meeting schedule; g) meeting material(deck). The meeting leaders need to achieve below goals during kick-off meeting:

·         Energize project team

·         Communicate goals and expectations

·         Introduce team members and stake-holders

·         Highlight importance of project for organization

·         Provide information of processes, communication plan, project plan, key milestones

·         Handout team members’ contact information including their function name

·         Present regular meeting schedule

·         Give time to attendees to ask questions and express views

 

Follow-up meeting

Project will persist for a period and need to schedule regular follow-up meeting to trace the whole progress of project including the status of plan,  outcome and key milestones by stage, feedback and challenge. During follow-up meeting, leaders should focus on those due pending action items, investigate the key issues, work out the solution with specific small group, and decide escalation items. At the same time, meeting leaders also need to reschedule separate meeting within small groups for specific goal and avoid wasting whole project team's time. At the end of follow-up meeting, meeting leader should summarize all outcomes, pending items, related action owners with deadline, and next meeting time.

Announcement of final outcome  

Once the project launches successfully, meeting leader will hold a final meeting named " Announcement of xxx Project". In this last meeting, meeting leader will announce the result of project and express appreciation on behalf of company. Furthermore, high level managers will be invited to present medals for those key contributors. But if the project fails to launch due to some reasons, project leaders also need to hold this meeting to announce the result, express personal appreciation for all team members, and brief the cause of failure.

How to conduct a meeting - Bad Practices

In this article, I would like to focus on bad practises sharing and discuss the real cost of bad meeting.

Bad practises

Ineffective meeting may be caused by either meeting leader or meeting attendees. There are two videos and we can learn how different roles impact a meeting.

Attendees - bad practises include:

·         Talking out of turn

·         Talking about each other

·         Aggressive behaviour

·         Lack of preparation

·         Mobile Device

 

Meeting Leader - bad practises include:

·         Starting late

·         Do not follow agenda

·         Losing control

·         Treating meeting carelessly

·         No listening or focusing on others' opinions

 

Cost of ineffective meeting

According below link, meeting are a multi-billion dollar drain on global economy every year. Bad meetings frustrate people, diminish productivity, reduce the bottom line, and negative affect the corporate culture. As a finance manager in a global company, over 50% of my working time are used in meeting, including team meeting, cross-functional meeting, regular finance review meeting, performance review with staff or manager, supplier meeting, and all kinds of project meeting. I feel very tired and I think most of meeting wasted my time but I have to attend because I wonder I will miss important information if I don't attend. Somtimes, the meeting covers multiple sections but invite people to attend the whole meeting which also waste people's time. You can learn more about the real cost of ineffective meeting which impel us to think about how to stop the ineffective meeting and save million cost for our companies. The Real Cost of Bad Meetings

 

Handling meeting impact from High tech

As I mentioned previously, high tech brings more convenient for our daily life and enable us to contact with people all over the world. We can hold an online meeting with our partners located in different countries, and needn't waste time and money for a travel. Voice conference, video conference and web conference enable us to conduct a meeting and exchange ideas with your colleagues across the country, or around the world easily.

But we also face more challenges due to these high tech. Meeting holder finds it is harder to control a meeting today. Hereby I would like to share my experience when I worked in a global company.

Today, Notebook is popular in office and people always bring their notebooks to attend meeting. They can use notebook to do presentation, easy to read online meeting deck. However, many people will use it to deal with their email during the meeting if they think the topics are not relative with them. It causes attendee's distraction and wastes other's time to repeat some topics. So for those attendees in the meeting room, meeting leader can clarify the ground rule - use computer only for meeting or ask everyone to close their notebooks. Meeting leader shares the meeting deck via projector and makes sure everyone can see it clearly. Otherwise, hardcopies should be prepared for attendees. For remote meeting, meeting leader can assign an coordinator at remote site to book a meeting room for local attendees and  lead deck sharing. Through these methods, meeting leader will control the meeting easily.

Video conference is the best channel for remote meeting because it enable real-time interaction in special viewing rooms. But the cost of video conference is expensive and equipment is not popular. So that video conference always limits in high level management meeting. For normal meeting, the popular channel is voice conference which enables people to collaborate by telephone. From previous video "  ConferenceCall Goes Out of Control"(you can click it to view the video), we learned that conference call often goes out of control when attendees don't focus on meeting or are late, their environment is noisy and so on. Meeting leader is only able to learn everything from telephone but the noisy from one attendee' phone also distracts the meeting. Firstly, outlook and IM provide live meeting which can make up the shortage of conference meeting and is free cost. Meeting leader can ask attendee mute their phone during meeting to avoid any unnecessary distraction, get a clear picture of attendees' status, share deck from different computer when there are multi-leaders in meeting, and control the meeting progress. Combined conference call with live meeting enable us to achieve the result of video conference without any additional cost and equipments.

 

Following up after meeting

By the end of meeting, meeting holder briefs those agreed decision in the meeting, lists down action items,  identifies action owners, and aligns the deadline of completion.  Most of the work has already been done by the time the meeting is over. But there are some crucial things left to do that can reinforce what you achieved or quickly help undo it.

 

Distribute meeting minutes

·         Time.  Write the meeting minutes as soon as possible after the meeting, when everything is still fresh in mind. One or two days will be perfect.

·         Elements. Meeting minutes should be highly summarized and brief instead of detail recording. There are five key elements including:

1.       Heading. Company name, date, location, and time of meeting starting and ending

2.       Attendee. Name of person conducting the meeting; job title or department for internal meeting; job title with company name for external meeting

3.       Outcome. Decision, agreement and commitment.

4.       Action items with time and owner.  A separate sheet of action items will be created so that every attendee can see clearly which action items belong them and when they need to finish.

5.       Next meeting time and place.  A note on where and when the next meeting will be held.

Follow up and Listen

The meeting holder needs to follow up with participants regularly before next  meeting to ensure action items are under way. Because many meeting participants fail to follow their action items until the day of next meeting.  At the same time, the meeting holder need to listen to action owners and get their feedbacks, work with them to investigate the problem deeply, consider the strategy of next meeting if some action items can't finish within the deadline.   

Taking control during the meeting

Before discussion about the control of meeting,  we go to see a video firstly which displays a awful situation - Conference Call Goes Out of Control.

 

High technology brings more convenient for mobile communication but it brings more challenge to control meeting as well. In this chapter, I will focus on how to control in normal meeting but I will extend to discuss the impact of High Tech in a separate chapter.

From the video, we are easy to find out some errors the meeting holder made as below. He totally lost control of meeting at the beginning and cannot start his meeting.

a)      Sent meeting invitation on last Friday

      b)      Gave less time to participate for preparation
      c)       Held conference call in non-working time
      d)      Did not get alignment of meeting schedule

Firstly, make sure meeting environment is free from distractions. Meeting holder must take 20 minutes in advance to check facilities are workable including meeting room, chairs, projector, conference phone, computer, and net. This action will enable meeting to start on time. Additionally, meeting holder need to pay more attention to environment of participates and ensure they can join meeting in a non-distraction place. We learn from above video that the meeting will lose control if we don't notice the environment.

Secondly, start on time, nail the intro and focus on agenda. Start on time, do not waste time to wait for somebody  or repeat something which has been mentioned before someone join. Otherwise,  you show disrespect  for  punctual persons.  Go in with a strong opening and you'll feel more confident throughout. Make sure it covers your main talking points and follow your agenda.

Thirdly, get people involved and avoid the digressions.

Mostly, people will not connect with all topics closely and will zone out.  So go into the meeting with just three ideas, thoughts, or points. Once you find someone mentally drift away, you can ask him or her some question or opinion.  But we often encounter digressions or conflicts during the meeting which drive us to meaningless arguments. If so, stop it timely and get back the control. You can write down the valuable arguments and reschedule a meeting to discuss it within the small group. Try to follow the timeline of agenda to finish all items and do not waste time to focus on one topic even through it is important. I attached a video link which is especially for meeting Chairs, Susan Leahy M.A. teaches how to make powerful interventions to handle difficult meeting situations.How to Be an Effective Chair (What to say when...)

Last but not least,  call to action and write down key points by topics. What is the action you want your meeting attendees to take? Most meetings end and nobody is sure what the next steps are. Make sure everyone knows exactly what the next action is. Write down action owners,  action items , agreements, and pending items.

Making a plan before meeting

The better plan is, the more effective meeting is. Before a meeting, we need to ask ourselves 3”W”: Why, Who, When.

Why

Meeting organizer should be clear about the meeting purpose and ensure meeting is the most effective channel for this purpose.

When you hold a meeting without clear topics, the meeting participators will feel confused and time-waste. A meeting holder invited many functions to attend ad-hoc meeting for urgent case. He just wanted to find out solution or action owner from these participators. But he didn’t know what the root cause was and who the key person to resolve it was.  So he was blocked when others inquired what they needed to do.  

At the same time, many people over use meeting as a method of problem resolving or a channel of communication. That is the reason that managers are busy in meetings and faced meeting schedule conflicts.  After you have a clear purpose and goal for a meeting, you still need check whether there is any more effective channel than meeting, such as telephone, email, or separately discussion with different functions, especially when you cannot get the alignment with all participators’ schedule.
Who

Meeting participator is a key element of meeting.  Wrong invitation will cause time consuming and credit loss. When people are invited wrongly, they may think this meeting holder is not serious and will ignore next invitation sometimes.  At the same time, they may challenge the holder in the meeting and waste others’ time. On the other hand, the level of participator should be thought about which depends on the meeting requirement. Sometimes we need persons who can make decision but sometimes we just need an expert to give valuable input. Do not invite high level manager to attend routing discussion or invite low level staff to attend decision making section. Otherwise, goal of meeting is hard to achieve.

When

A proper agenda makes half of success of meeting.  Meeting holder should focus on his topics to draft an agenda. After that, the schedule of meeting should be aligned with participators especially those key persons.  Pay more attention – do not arrange a meeting on Friday if you could. Because most of people are making the weekend plan and may not concentrate on meeting and there is high risk that some key persons will be absent.  If you arrange a staff meeting near lunch time, a working meal will motivate staffs and shows your appreciation of their time. The most important thing is to send the agenda before meeting which helps participates to make preparations.

A good arrangement will lead success of meeting!