Speaker 1: Are you meeting all day and working all night? Stop this madness. Find out how you can run more effective and efficient meetings by watching this video. Hi, my name is Adriana Gertler. I'm a Productivity Specialist, President of Cornerstone Dynamics and myvisualvision.com. I'm here to talk to you about how you can make your business more effective and more efficient by meeting all day and working all night. I'm a Productivity Specialist, President of Cornerstone Dynamics and myvisualvision.com. Today, I'm gonna share with you my top seven tips that I use all the time for running meetings. And why is this even something that you wanna think about? Because I get called to run meetings all the time with top organizations. And this is something which over and over again, I find to be tried and true, never fails me, and I always get complimented on it. So, take note, get your pen and paper out, and let's start talking about how to run effective and efficient meetings. So, why are we even looking at this? Well, back in 2012, salary.com did a survey and they found that the number one time waster at work was ineffective meetings. They just wasted tons of time. And that went up from the number three spot in 2008. And I promise you, it's not getting any better. More and more, I see meetings are becoming more ineffective and less efficient. And I really can't pinpoint why this is occurring, but all I know is we have to go to the root and teach people how to run proper meetings. So, let's go on to my tips that I wanna share with you. Now, in order to even look at these tips, we gotta think of meetings in kind of these three buckets. The first bucket is meeting preparation. The second bucket is actual meetings themselves. And then the third bucket is post-meeting. Now, if you look at a meeting and you consider in all those three stages, that's a huge benefit because meetings aren't just the meeting that you are attending. It goes beyond that. It's the preparation and the post as well. So, on that note, here are my top seven tips. So, let's talk about the first section, meeting preparation. So, tip number one is I would like for you to ban all the update meetings. And I want you to rethink your meetings. No more updates. That is probably the number one time waster I see all the time. Meetings need to be purposeful. They should be about resolution, brainstorming, any activity from like risk management, approvals, things where when you're bringing people in a room and you need them together in order to move forward on an issue or to create ideas, that's what you use a meeting for, not updates. We have amazing technology. So, let's use that technology, ban those update meetings, and you will see a huge difference. So, from now on, in your pre-meeting preparation is ask yourself, what meeting are you running? If it's an update meeting, don't even bother sending out that invite. I want you to put some sort of summary in an email and send it out to people that way, or do your one-on-ones and get your information, but do not do a meeting for an update. That's the greatest gift you can give to your team members and the biggest paradigm shift for you in order to run meetings more effectively and efficiently. Tip number two is get all your documentation in order. What? Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, Adriana. That's probably simple and everyone goes, of course we do it. Well, how do you do it and when do you do it? A lot of times we get this meeting preparation the night before or a day before, and that's just not enough time, particularly when someone is on the agenda in order to prepare what they need to do the meeting. So, think about what it is that you need. Now that you're being purposeful with your meetings, prep things accordingly. Think of your pre-read. If you're doing more brainstorming resolution stuff, that stuff you will need, and you will have to give it to the participants. So, you have to think about that timing, and that's really critical. And by the way, if you're looking for agendas, which are really important from a meeting perspective, then you can go to my website below, saying, well, actually it's Cornerstone Dynamics, not My Visual Vision. I gotta remember which one it was. Cornerstone Dynamics, and you can get a free agenda template. This video, by the way, has tons of downloads. So, I want you to really contemplate going afterwards to the Show Me section and checking out all those downloads that I'm gonna have for you. Tip number three is prepare your meeting kit. Now that you're purposeful with your meetings, you're gonna have to have some things with you all the time. So, when I do my brainstorming and resolution and risk management meetings, I have my sticky notes, my Sharpies, my stickers for voting, my white paper. There's tons of things that I have, and I actually have a Tupperware container with all that stuff in it. So, now that you know your meetings are of a purpose, then you need a good meeting kit to ensure that you have those things at your fingertips, because the last thing you wanna do is kill your flow of your meeting and having to walk out to grab something. You just lost precious time, and you're gonna take a lot more energy and effort getting people up to that flow that you were originally at before you left. So, that's really important is grab a meeting kit. Now that we've done our preparatory work, I want you to think about the meeting itself. So, tip number four, that is arrive early to set up your meeting. If you're a meeting facilitator or the organizer, please come early to ensure that you have everything there, as well as that you're set up for any of those conference calls with screen sharings, because I don't know how many times I've been in meetings where there's been technical issues. The meeting was supposed to start at nine o'clock sharp, and we really didn't get the ball rolling to 9.15 because we were dealing with technical difficulties. So, the biggest tip from a meeting itself is come in early, get everything set up so when everyone walks in, you can just get going and start being effective and efficient. Tip number five, when you're in your meetings, is use specific tools to help ensure that your participants understand what is expected of them. Now, there's three tools that I love using all the time. The first one are meeting rules. I'm a big proponent of meeting rules, and I highly recommend it. In fact, that's another download I have, is a free poster that you can download off my website, cornersnowdynamics.com, and those I recommend you have in every single meeting room. And the first thing you do when your participants come in is, hey, let's review the rules, and you go through all the rules. The second tool that I use all the time with my participants is I then talk about time outs. Like a referee in a game, you have to call a time out when a play is not done well. Now, in a scenario for a meeting, it's, hey, I'm running out of time, or you didn't follow one of the session rules, so you call a time out. Now, for this to work well, you have to actually ask permission from people at the beginning of the meeting. So when you walk in your meeting, not only do you review the rules, you go, do I have your permission to time you out so I can keep things on track? And you'll be amazed. Everyone always says yes, because guess what? Everyone has the same purpose. They want to have a good meeting. And the last tool that I use that goes in conjunction with a time out is a parking lot. So if someone is passionate about something and time is a ticking, because I'm looking at the clock, then you need to actually put their idea somewhere, because if you just cut the conversation right there and then, you lost them. Their innovation and their ideas is not going to be on the table, because they're going to feel very hurt that, wait a minute, that was really important to me. You just cut my conversation. So you put it on a parking lot. Now, please just don't put it on the parking lot and then throw away the paper. Put it on the parking lot and do something with it. You want to either make it a next agenda item or speak to the person afterwards to get the information that they need. So that, three tips. Three tips is what's going to help you to manage your participants in your meeting. Tip number six. This one is something I find most organizations don't do, which really results into why, when you have a meeting, people walk away and you're really not too sure where status is on stuff. And that is, at the end of your meeting, the last five, 10 minutes, summarize all the agreed upon action items. So many people don't do this. They actually just hope that everyone took their notes and then no one is following up. And then you wonder why perhaps tasks didn't get done according to plan. So ensure at the end of the meeting, go through your task list. Okay, let's review what we all agreed upon and put responsibility and due dates associated with those task lists. That's a fantastic way to keep effective and efficient. And the last part that I want you to consider is the post-meeting ritual that you now have to look at. And that is everything you've collected, I would like for you to send it within 24 hours max, ideally two to three hours. What? Adriana, you know how much cleaning up I have to do? Hold it. You're gonna be effective and efficient. You're gonna be starting to do things differently. You're gonna have templates that you're gonna use. You're gonna be collecting information in the meeting so that when you're doing your review, you should have everything you need in a nice template. And so all you gotta do is clean it up and then send it out. So yes, you can send things out two to three hours after a meeting. Highly recommend it. It's fresh in people's mind and it ensures that they stay on track with what it is that they have agreed to do. So let's recap. In order to run effective and efficient meetings, you need to do the three big buckets. There's the preparatory work, there's the meeting itself, and the post-work. I think one of the biggest takeaways is really think about what type of meeting you're having. If you're having update meetings, ban them. I know it's gonna be a new way of working for you because you're so used to just collecting people and asking them so you can check things off your list. But in actuality, you're doing and you're perpetuating a problem that we have in our organizations and that is meetings are wasting time. So on that note, if you want more information on meetings, I have lots of resources in the Show More section underneath this video. Please check it out. I also have a pocketbook which is called Good Meetings Equals Great Results. I promise you there's a lot more information in there too because you also have to consideration team dynamics, facilitation techniques. Perhaps those will be more videos down the road. Let me know. On that note, if you can give me a two thumbs up, subscribe to the video as well as share this with your colleagues because the more people that know how to run effective and efficient meetings, the better off our corporate world will be. Thank you so much and I'll see you at the next video. Bye.