The efficiency of meetings directly affects an organisation’s efficiency and people’s stress levels. When participants come from different parts of an organization, or from a number of organizations, the complexity rises; so integrated, efficient meeting processes are essential.
Stakeholders need to be able to freely participate in agenda development and the completion of agreed actions, from wherever they are located. It is also desireable that other stakeholders who are not directly involved are kept informed.
A number of attempts have been made to develop methods and software to manage meetings, but most software is designed for the meeting facilitator to set up a meeting and not to involve all the other meeting stakeholders. In addition, organization firewalls usually make it difficult to effectively involve people who are outside the agency (such as subject experts or consultants).
Recently, a method and software that runs on both web and mobile phone browsers has been developed that facilitates cross organization and between organizations meeting management. The method can be applied manually, but the web software makes it easy for both physical and virtual meeting participants to collaborate in a simple structured way using the web and emails.
Key parts of the process are:
•A simple means to manage the agenda and to encourage participants to contribute to and understand agenda detail before the meeting.
•The ability to progressively record and agree actions during the meeting.
•A consolidated ToDo list for each stakeholder that includes the actions from the meeting, plus actions from other meetings and non meeting tasks.
•Managing actions and tracking completion (so nothing important is lost), and all stakeholders can see progress.
•Feedback to stakeholders about relevant changes or the completion of an agreed action
•Reports can be used as meeting Minutes
Streamlining both physical and virtual meeting management will significantly improve the efficiency of this critical activity. Plus personal stress is reduced by eliminating a lot of the manual recording and tracking, and having to remember to keep others informed about what is happening.