Organizing Productive Meetings – PAT
Good management includes effective meeting management skills. Organizing a meeting efficiently means your meetings are productive, not a total waste of time.
The key to effective meeting management is PAT. Your meetings ought to have a P- purpose; A- agenda and T- timeframe, or else, don´t do it at all.
In one or two sentences, define the purpose of the meeting. For example, you can say that “This meeting is about planning for a new marketing campaign”, or “We need to review the shipping´s new policy about handling returns”. Stating the purpose makes everyone know why they are there and what needs to be done and they can assess whether they´re successful or not. List the items you are going to discuss, review or inspect in the agenda. Assign a time limit for discussing each item. Identify the person that would speak or moderate the discussion.
Start The Meeting On Time
Set a start and end time for the timeframe. Determine a time duration for each item to be tackled in the agenda which all totals to the overall timeframe. It is important to start the meeting on time. Even if some people hasn´t come in yet, go ahead anyway, don´t wait. If others arrive late, continue with the discussion, no need to review what was already covered. You shouldn´t waste your time and others´who are already in the meeting.
In case the meeting organizer or sponsor doesn´t show up, cancel the meeting and continue with your work. It varies among companies how long to wait for an organizer, but some wouldn´t wait longer than 5 minutes.Minutes Of The Meeting
Other than the organizer, someone has to keep the minutes of the meeting. The nature of the items discussed and the skill of the note taker determines how detailed the minutes will be. The set agenda should serve as the note taker´s outline for the minutes. In the minutes, the note taker lists who were present, what was discussed, agreements that were reached and action items that might have been assigned.
A topic keeper can be assigned to keep the meeting focused. What the topic keeper does is interrupt when the topic strays from the real issue being discussed. If new, irrelevant topics raise concerns, they can be tabled for later or scheduled for their own meeting.
