Hi this is Cyril from Work Smarter Live Better. In this short video, I want to share with you three very simple questions to ask before accepting any meeting.
One of my client in Australia is a very large financial institution and they have a very, very strong meeting culture. Whenever they may need to make a decision, whether it’s a small one or a large one, a big decision, they need a meeting. And so of course, they are bombard with meeting, there have back to back meetings everywhere, and they’re all whinging, all the managers are whinging about the amount of meetings they have but also how inefficient a lot of meetings that they’re having are.
So I was making a very simple suggestion. We’re working with them and there’s a lot of thing you can do. Let me be very clear, I don’t pretend that I’m going to solve everything about meeting with a simple advice but it just a little thing that you can do that make a difference.
It’s to think about, before accepting a meeting, think about P-A-P.
P for purpose, A for agenda, P for prep.
So before accepting a meeting make sure that you’re very clear on the purpose. Why are we having this meeting? What’s the issue? What’s the outcome that we expect?
The Agenda. Ask a very simple agenda. It could be three bullet points or four bullet points but it just shows that a person has spent some time thinking about it.
And Prep is what are people expected to prep before the meeting. So just three simple things.
One of my clients, they went a little bit further and they’ve agree as a team that before having a meeting, they always need to have in the invite the three things and they all always need to send that at least 48-hour before. And so 48-hour before the meeting, I need to receive the purpose, the agenda and the prep. And the other thing that they’ve agreed is no one will come to the meeting unprepared. So if the prep is just read this document, everyone commit to it for the meeting, i.e. having read the document before.
This is this week Work Smarter Live Better tip. Just one little tip on meeting culture, there’s a lot of thing you can do to improve the efficiency of meetings. So it was just one little advice this P-A-P, one little advice on meeting. I’d love to know what you do to improve the efficiency of the meetings in your organization. Just share with all of us, I love when I have a few people that share ideas, share that with all of us. One simple tip that you do that can improve meetings and will share with everyone.
You have a lovely day, I’ll speak to you soon. Cheers, Bye!
