If you have a focused and productive meeting at regular intervals you can ensure that throughout the intervening period your necessary contact with your team will be kept to an efficient minimum. However, meetings can be complete time drains with never ending debating and arguing that can suck the energy and enthusiasm out of everybody present if they are executed badly. Steve’s here to tell you how to avoid this and get it right.

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS 

• When setting up a regular meeting stick to the same time and the same invite list and also the same agenda. In this way your team knows that their question will be addressed at the regular appropriate time. 
• Be very clear on the length of the meeting and stick to it. This gives people confidence that they can fit the meeting in and it’s not going to overrun and leave them short of time. 
• At your first meeting, brainstorm on everything that is going on in your business that’s warrants a discussion or solution. You can then rationalise all that into grouping by subject or department, time required or urgency.
• You can then create specific goals from this list for each quarter. Anything that does not pertain to the goals on the list you can leave for the next quarter.  
• You may decide that once your list is complete, not all staff need to be present at the meeting for the issues that do not pertain to their function.
• Before the meeting starts, a quick session is completed to go through any issues that have been voiced during the week and prioritise them. This is done in case time runs out. Then there is an update stage, an information sharing stage to keep everyone informed of relevant information and celebrate good news. The next stage is the KPI review where all the team claim the items on the list that they are responsible for and what progress they have made. Then a goal review is undertaken that any tasks that are being progressed are in line with the company goals. Next is a to do list review, then a issues and questions section then penultimately, this weeks to do list is decided and assigned.
• The final task is each team member rates the meeting to ensure its ongoing effectiveness. Five stars are awarded based on 1 star each for ; Did the meeting start and finish on time? Was everyone relevant present? Was the agenda covered? Was the schedule kept to? Were there any unnecessary tangents or subject overruns? 

 

BEST MOMENTS 

 

‘We got to a point in our business a few years ago where all our meetings was just taking over and I never felt like we got anything done in those meetings.’ 

‘Because there is a bit of a delay between them actually asking a question and getting them answered they’ll often go and figure stuff out for themselves in the meantime.’

‘The idea is that this list of issues, that you’ve got because everybody has been involved in creating, that there is now buy in with everybody who was in that meeting.’

‘What you end up doing is after that initial brainstorm, and maybe there is seventy things on that list to begin with, you group them together so you’ve got forty odd, you choose the top five to seven, and there’s another ten that’s sort of connected, and everything else gets parked.’ 

‘We actually created a KPI for me. I have to be named and shamed if I have delays and have overdue tasks in my inbox and that’s great, it motivates me to do it.’

‘Everybody at the end goes round and gives their score. It then means we are being held accountable as a group to actually turn up on time, do what we promised we were gonna do, stick to the agenda, make sure we actually cover the stuff on the issues list and move the business forward.’

 

VALUABLE RESOURCES

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/SystemsAndOutsourcing/ 

Website: https://systemsandoutsourcing.com/welcome-1 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/drsteveday   

The RIGHT Assistants For Your Business by Dr Steve Day  http://bit.ly/sys-10

 

ABOUT THE HOST

Steve used to be a slave to his business but when he moved to Sweden in 2015, he was forced to change the way he worked. He switched to running his businesses remotely and after totally nailing this concept he decided to spend his time helping other small business owners do the same. Steve’s been investing in property since 2002, has a degree in Computing, and worked as a doctor in the NHS before quitting to focus full-time on sharing his systems and outsourcing Methodology with the world. He now lives in Sweden and runs his UK-based businesses remotely with the help of his team of Filipino and UK-based Virtual Assistants.

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