When I speak to businesses about standard meetings I’m often met with glazed looks.
I accept that they aren’t the sexiest of topic, but they can bring so many benefits. Being brilliant at business basics can take us such a long way along our improvement journey that they can’t be underestimated.
In this article I’ll recap on what a standard meeting is and then I’ll run through a few of the benefits in case you are one of the people that is on the fence about using them.
Standard meetings – what are they?
A standard meeting is any meeting that has a repeating agenda. It is especially useful from a process driven approach.
The effectiveness of the meeting comes from the repetition. They aren’t meant to be boring, they are meant to bring familiarity and competence.
Constantly changing a meeting agenda (or worse, not defining one) doesn’t help your team to find their groove and become good at using the meeting as a tool to express ideas and make decisions.
If you take any of your meetings and define a fixed agenda, and you repeat the meeting as part of a routine, I’d said you have a standard meeting.
Benefit #1 – getting a grip
Gaining control over a process is the first step, before you try to improve it and drive up its efficiency. There is no point speeding up a journey to the wrong destination!
By having a repeating agenda, your team’s competence can then be directed at getting your processes under control. The rigid, repeating fashion of a standard meeting will help you to do this.
Once you have your process under control, you can then use your team’s expertise and talents to make the process better. This is the essence of continuous improvement. Remember, grip then efficiency.
Benefit #2 – engaging the team
As the team will know what is going to happen during the meeting, they can start to engage with it more effectively. A new agenda can put a lot of people off their stride and that isn’t conducive to productive meetings.
As you embed the standard meetings approach, you can allocate responsibilities to your team who can then start to lead various elements of the meeting. Eventually you might be able to hand the meeting over to one of your team to chair the entire meeting.
As the standard agenda becomes more familiar, along with the pattern of the meeting, your team relax. This is good for a participation point of view, but not good for complacency. You need to get the balance right and bear this in mind as you progress with your series of meetings.
Don’t change the meeting agenda in an attempt to keep things fresh. Use the positive progress your team can deliver with a static agenda to make the content within the agenda fresh.
Benefit #3 – saving management hours
Now that you have a grip on your processes and your team are engaged, can you now save some time? Absolutely!
By repeating the same agenda, meeting after meeting, you can look for ways to become more efficient at handling the meeting. If the meeting has been designed correctly, the meeting should be adding value to your business and your team. If it isn’t, you might need to reconsider parts of the agenda.
As a note here, it is likely that you will need to adjust the agenda as the business develops and situations change. Gradually changing the agenda over time is fine, this won’t cause any shocks to the team and allow you to maintain a high level of productivity and effectiveness from the meeting.
If you can develop an effective standard meetings approach, and can eventually pass the meeting on to your team to run, you have the potential to save some notable hours within your management role. If you aren’t able to pass the meeting on, but if the team pull together and it delivers results / decisions and you make the meeting as short as possible, then it can still save you hours.
Knowing your goals for each standard meeting is critical at the outset to ensure that you reach your objectives rather than just holding meetings!
Is it time to standardise?
One of the best forms of a standard meeting that I use is the Sunrise Meeting approach. If you haven’t used this approach before, it is a standard meeting that is process driven and helps you to get a grip on your business’ activities.
They are short to run and capture all of the points listed above. I wrote a book on Sunrise Meetings a few years ago, which takes you through the steps of creating and running these meetings. In fact, just the other day I implemented a sunrise meeting because they are one of the fastest ways to get an operation under control.
I hope that you see the benefits of standard meetings and I wish you all the best at giving them a go, if you aren’t using them already.
