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How soon should the note-taker distribute the minutes? Experts disagree on this question—within three or four days, no later than two days after the meeting, in 24 hours.

The best answer to this question would be as soon as possible. You should set a deadline based on the means of distribution and the content and format of the minutes. The shorter the deadline, the more you emphasize the importance of the meeting.

Sure, the note-taker has other work to do, but if you want everybody to recognize that meetings matter, you should expect the note-taker to make the minutes a top priority. That sense of immediacy also sends the message that the assignments outlined in those minutes should also be a priority for the participants to whom they’re assigned. Read the rest of this entry »

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The minutes of a meeting are essential to following up on the decisions and the assignments. Good minutes document not only what happened during the meeting but also whatis scheduled to happen as a result of the meeting.

Write ’Em Right

Traditionally, the minutes of most meetings are prose narratives that tend to be dull and just go on and on or else are so brief that they don’t provide a fair sense of what happened in the meeting.

Minutes can more effectively capture the essence of a meeting and show what the participants have accomplished and will accomplish when they focus on action. Action minutes are basically lists, rather than narratives—easy to read and understand.

It should be noted here that good narrative minutes may be more appropriate, even necessary, for some meetings. If the group moves fast, if a meeting covers multiple projects, and/or if discussion is involved, the minutes should capture the main lines of thinking, the discussion threads, the issues raised, and how the group addressed them. As we’ve emphasized throughout this book, you should always consider your situation, the people, the culture, and the purposes of your meeting. If you decide that a narrative—“intelligent minutes”—would be more appropriate, you should probably ask the note-taker to prepare action minutes as well, as a summary to accompany the narrative.

As outlined in Chapter 3, the minutes should include the following:
1. Date, time, and location of the meeting
2. List of participants
3. List of people invited but absent
4. Participants assigned as facilitator, scribe, timekeeper, and note-taker
5. Agenda
6. For each agenda item:
– Main discussion points and outcomes (decisions and action items)
– Names of the participants responsible for the action items and the dates and times for completion
– Result(s) expected

7. Items for consideration at later meetings
8. Meeting evaluation
9. Reports (attached)

The minutes should be easy to scan: a simple structure helps the facts stand out—decisions and actions are put in boldface or all caps.

If you’ve created a form for the minutes, as suggested in Chapter 3, it should be easy for anyone to know what’s most important about a meeting at a glance—what was covered, what was decided, what actions were planned, what’s expected and by when, and who is responsible for those actions.

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Allow appropriate time to evaluate the meeting. How long? The answer to that question is…it depends on the following factors:
• How well your meetings have gone, in general. But be careful: don’t use evaluations only when there are problems.  Evaluations can help good meetings become even better.
• How well the members of the group know each other.
• How much time can reasonably be allotted for the evaluation.
• The points that you want to cover in your evaluation. A lot or a few? General areas or specific items?
• The method of evaluation.
The last two points are choices that depend on the first three points.

A good rule of thumb might be to allow a maximum of 10 minutes for evaluating a meeting of two hours or longer. For a written evaluation, 10 minutes should be enough. For a discussion, you might allow a little longer. For a written evaluation followed by discussion, 15 minutes might be adequate.

Whatever method(s) you use to evaluate your meetings, emphasize that participants should focus on problems with the process and not judge or blame the people. If they comment on the facilitator, the scribe, or the timekeeper, they should note what they did that was helpful and offer one suggestion for improvement. Also, evaluations should elicit positive comments as well as negative, because knowing what works can help you identify what to keep doing to be effective.

No Time to Evaluate
What if you just run out of time before you can do any evaluation? Distribute a written evaluation to all the participants, as an e-mail or a memo, immediately after the meeting. It’s generally not advisable to hand out forms as they leave the meeting: if you’re running so late that you can’t squeeze in an evaluation, participants are likely to be thinking about what they’re doing next, so they tuck away the form and may forget about it. But if the form comes to them as part of their normal business activity, they’re probably going to give it some time and attention.

How you evaluate a meeting depends on the purpose(s) of the meeting, the people who participated, the culture of your unit, and the problems that you’ve noted and want to resolve.

Taken From : The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings

You can also do evaluations of the facilitator, the scribe, and the timekeeper the first few times that you use these roles, to help the group understand the process better and to help everyone be more aware of the responsibilities and challenges of each role.

In Running Effective Meetings (p. 42), the authors suggest asking the following questions of these role players:
Facilitator
• What was it like to facilitate?
• What did you try to do to help?
• What was frustrating or challenging?
Scribe
• What was it like to be the scribe?
• What was frustrating or challenging?
Timekeeper
• What was it like to help the group deal with time issues?
• What was frustrating or challenging?

Because these individuals have special perspectives of the meeting process, you should follow up the comments on frustrations and challenges by probing for reasons and for suggestions on how to improve. Then, open up the discussion to the rest of the group for further comments.

Another way to have the role players evaluate the meeting is to have them gather afterwards to discuss the meeting. Ask each to write down any advice that he or she would offer other people chosen for that particular role. You can then share that advice with the individuals to whom you assign those roles for the next meeting and with the group at the start of the meeting.

Taken From : The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings

Open. Open-ended questions require more time and energy from participants, but they also usually provide more information. Make them as specific or as general as you like, but try to word them to be as neutral as possible, so as not to influence the participants. For example, “the agenda was appropriate” would be a better statement than “your manager created a great agenda.”

One method is for the facilitator to pass around 3 x 5 or 4 x 6 index cards at the end of the meeting and ask three basic questions:

1. What did you like most about this meeting?
2. What did you like least about this meeting?
3. How could we improve the next meeting?

For a more focused assessment, you could print evaluations with more specific open-ended questions, such as those listed in The Team Handbook (p. 4-9):
• How did this meeting go?
• How were the pace, flow, and tone of the meeting?
• Did we handle items in a reasonable sequence? Did we get stuck?
• How well did we stay on the topic?
• How well did we discuss the information? How clearly? How accurately?
• How well did we respond to each other’s questions?
• What might we do differently? What should we do that we didn’t do? Do more of? Do less of? Not do at all?
• What was just right and should continue as is?
• Any other comments, observations, recommendations?

Notice that the final question shifts the series of questions from focused to totally open. It’s usually good to allow at least one such question, so you don’t miss anything that any member of the group might consider important—and to allow members the freedom to take the evaluation in any direction.

You may want to open up the evaluation even further, by moving from the written form into a discussion. At this point, however, time becomes an issue. It could take participants five minutes to write out their comments and any discussion would likely take at least 10 minutes more. That’s a big chunk of a meeting that runs only one or two hours. That’s why long written evaluations are appropriate only after meetings that take one or two days, not for shorter meetings. One exception would be if you’re consistently having problems with your meetings and decide to devote a meeting to evaluating the process and group dynamics.

If you decide to follow a written evaluation with a discussion, here are some suggestions. The facilitator should first make sure that all of the participants have finished completing their forms. He or she should watch for signs that most have stopped writing and are looking up from the forms, then ask if anybody needs more time.

The discussion should be based on several selected questions, not all of them, or just start with a totally open question. If you want to discuss several questions, the facilitator should instruct the timekeeper to allow a certain amount of time for each question.

When the time for discussion expires, the facilitator should ask for the evaluation forms. Don’t be surprised if some members of the group start writing again; discussions can stimulate thinking and help people remember comments that they wanted to make.

Taken From : The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings

Evaluations in writing offer several advantages over the methods described previously:
• Participants may express things in writing that they would not mention in a group.
• Participants may express themselves better and more completely in writing than orally.
• Writing provides direct documentation of reactions, not captured and summarized by the scribe and/or the notetaker.
• You can usually cover more items in written form than in a discussion.
• You can better direct the input you want through the format you choose.

And no, written evaluations don’t necessarily take a lot of time, either to prepare or to conduct.

However, there are disadvantages. One is that many written comments are difficult to understand and/or don’t provide sufficient basis for taking action. Another is that it’s more difficult to share the information with the group and it takes someone time and effort to analyze the evaluations and present the essence.

Finally, most groups strongly prefer evaluating orally.

For these reasons, it’s probably best to use written evaluations only if verbal methods won’t work for some reason, such as if some participants won’t speak out frankly. You should also decide who will read and analyze the evaluations and how you and the group will work with the results.

Multiple-Choice. A format that usually takes little time and provides very specific input asks participants to indicate their reaction to a statement with yes or no and/or on a Likert scale (usually
three, four, or five points). The facilitator distributes a form and asks participants to rate the meeting on criteria important to the group.
They each complete the forms, individually and silently, and then return them to the facilitator.

Figure 5-1 shows a
simple form for evaluating meetings, taken from Communicating Effectively, by Lani Arredondo (p. 164). The author used it for evaluating meetings in general (with a scale of “usually—sometimes—rarely”), and modified it slightly to focus on a specific meeting.

Plot, Don’t Average When analyzing the results of evaluations that use a Likert scale, it may be tempting to calculate an average for each item. Don’t do it! Averages can minimize or conceal some important differences.

Instead, for each item show a dot plot.That way it’s easy for anyone to see at a glance any significant differences among members of the group or any extremes that an average would not show.

You can mix rating scales, as shown (Figure 5-2) in this short evaluation form presented as an example in The Team Handbook (p. 4-10), which uses three-point and six-point Likert scales:

Our meeting today was: Focused 1 2 3 4 Rambling The pace was: Too fast Just right Too slow Everyone got a chance to participate: Yes Somewhat No Our purpose was: Clear 1 2 3 4 Confused We made good progress on our plan: Yes Somewhat No We followed our ground rules: Yes Somewhat No If you mix rating scales, be careful not to make the form too complex. Also, you could space the statements to allow for comments to be added after any or all of them.
Any evaluation form that you take from a book—even the best form, even the best book—should be modified to fit your situation and your culture. For example, you might include statements about the rules the group has set for meetings (see Chapter 3).
Here are some statements to get you started in developing your evaluation form:
• Members were notified enough in advance.
• There was an appropriate and well-organized agenda.
• The agenda was distributed in advance.
• The meeting room was scheduled and set up properly.
• The meeting was well organized.
• Everyone invited attended.
• Everyone who attended arrived on time.
• The meeting started on time.
• The manager and/or facilitator made clear the purpose(s) for the meeting.

• There was a transition from the last meeting.
• One topic was discussed at a time.
• All members participated in the discussions.
• One person had the floor at a time.
• There was an atmosphere of free expression.
• Participants showed respect for each other.
• The facilitator made good use of questions.
• The facilitator summarized the main points of each discussion.
• The discussion was relevant.
• The group considered the pros and cons of all issues.
• Decisions were made fairly.
• The meeting proceeded at an appropriate pace.
• The meeting covered the entire agenda, as planned.
• The group achieved the purpose(s) of the meeting.
• Assignments were complete and clear.
• Responsibilities were evenly distributed.
• Plans for the next meeting were announced.
• The atmosphere of the meeting was good.
• The meeting ended on time.

Remember: you should develop the evaluation to fit your people and your meetings. If you simply borrow a form, participants may feel that it’s not worth it for them to put much time and thought into using it. Invite the group to modify the form so it addresses the issues that are important to them.

Taken From : The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings

The most common way of evaluating meetings is to have the participants do it. There are dozens of options. The simplest method of evaluation is a round of feedback at the end of the meeting. You can prepare one or more simple questions for the group.
For example:
• Did you read the agenda in advance and prepare to discuss the items?
• Did you contribute to the meeting to the best of your ability?
• Do you know what you are responsible for doing as a result of this meeting?
• How could we improve the next meeting?

Another simple way to evaluate a meeting is through gestures.
This method is described briefly in The Team Handbook (p. 4-10). The facilitator asks how participants would rate the meeting and they signal their overall evaluation with thumbs up (good), thumbs sideways (neither good nor bad), or thumbs down (bad). Then each in turn explains his
or her reasons.

A variant of this method would be to have the facilitator read a list of specific items, one by one. Another variant would be to use either of these approaches, but ask for reasons only from participants who gave a thumbsdown to the meeting. The facilitator could also follow up on the reactions by asking for any suggestions for improvement.

A more open method of eliciting feedback is round-robin comments. The facilitator asks each participant in turn to share his or her reactions with the others. This method is especially good when participation has been uneven, because it encourages more reserved members of the group to contribute, providing perspectives that otherwise might not come forth.

A less structured method is a general discussion: just ask for reactions and participants volunteer their comments. This works well if other general discussions have been balanced and at least moderately orderly.

The facilitator can also provide some focus for the roundrobin or general discussion by asking questions. They can be comprehensive—What did we do that worked well? What could we have done better?—or specific—How could the agenda have been improved? What could we do to promote more participation?

When participants share their reactions, the facilitator should guide the discussion just as he or she would guide discussion of agenda items. By probing for clarification, by paraphrasing, and by following up with questions, the facilitator should try to elicit suggestions for improving meetings.

Whatever method of oral evaluation you use, the facilitator should ask the scribe to record all comments and suggestions. It might also be good for the note-taker to keep track as well, since participants can become quite animated when sharing their reactions.

All of these methods should end with agreement on at least one thing to do to improve the next meeting.

Taken From : The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings

How do you feel when you’ve done your best, when you’ve put your heart and mind into a team effort, and it just ends abruptly? Well, do you want the participants of a meeting to feel the same way? When a meeting ends, the facilitator should thank the participants:
1. Thank (again) any participants who made presentations, gave reports, or contributed in any other way that required preparation.
2. Thank the scribe, the timekeeper, and the note-taker.
3. Thank anyone assigned to a task, especially those who volunteered.
4. Thank the rest of the participants.

It’s always good to show that you genuinely appreciate what members of the group contributed to the meeting. After all, those who’ve done their best deserve to know that you appreciate their efforts—and those who haven’t contributed their all to the team effort may feel a little embarrassed and may resolve to do better the next time.

Evaluate the Meeting

The authors of The Team Handbook put it simply (p. 4-9):
“Evaluating every meeting is key to having effective meetings.”
That’s why we’re devoting so many pages in this chapter to evaluations.

There are various methods for evaluating a meeting. In this section we’ll consider a range of possibilities.

Which way is best? That depends on your situation, the people, the preparation, and other factors. You may want to experiment a little or to alternate among the methods.

Taken From : The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings