KAREN CROUCH’s firm was once asked to sit in on a practice’s meetings and offer guidance on how staff can extract more from these interactions. Here’s what she found.
While meetings are often loathed for being time-consuming and unproductive, executing them well is pivotal for collaboration and organisational success. And there are many techniques to ensure meetings – not just one-on-one meetings but formal office forums – bring value to the practice.
Effective communication is essential to developing a well-coordinated, team- focused environment. Conducting effective meetings – whether for educational or practice management purposes or general team building – is a key to maximise the effective communication effort.
Practices sometimes pride themselves on strong interpersonal communication based on the number of meetings. But on closer inspection, it’s clear they often lack the more important factors of quality and results.
Our firm was once requested to assess the effectiveness of a particular practice’s meetings to enrich the quality and ‘achievement value’ of these gatherings, improving decision-making, and promulgating meeting resolutions including enactment of the decisions.
Practice meetings were conducted between various job families: administration, clinicians and principals. Most felt the level of communication within the practice was high. However, most interviewees agreed that decisions were not always clear, or communicated effectively despite ample debate about issues in point.
This resulted in poor implementation of meeting resolutions.
With staff cooperation and input, we defined the following attributes of an effective meeting:
- Ensure a planned ‘agenda’ to impart a clear understanding of subject matter and target outcomes
- Improve communication and decision making
- Exchange experiences, information and knowledge between participants
- ‘Work smarter’ (research) forums
- Implement decisions effectively including post-implementation reviews to assess success
- Complement and potentially improve corporate governance.
Some meetings for social purposes – such as Christmas party planning – were conducted on an informal basis, mainly for office planning purposes and for business/relationship development efforts. Generally, content was less structured, albeit well planned beforehand. Such gatherings were obviously more relaxed and did not require much structuring or deeper review.
We asked meeting groups the following questions, based on the general principles of effective meetings:
- Do meetings have a pre-circulated agenda? This indicates a purpose for the meeting and provides participants with subject matter they may investigate for debate or presentment.
- Is a chair or leader appointed? Evidence there will be a ‘controller’ to focus attendees on agenda items under discussion, assign actions to specific individuals where necessary, and ‘watch the clock’ so items are not left undecided. The importance of formally deferring items (developing a ‘deferred items’ list) that may not have been discussed due to time delays or excessive discussion was highlighted to ensure they are carried forward to the next meeting.
- Are desired outcomes or decision options understood? Where applicable, this ensures participants are aware a decision is required for certain discussion items and staff should be prepared to voice personal views on various topics.
- Are meetings properly ‘time planned’? This suggests thought has been given to adequacy of time required to do justice to each topic by ‘guesstimating’ the approximate amount of time required to address each agenda item.
- Is relevant pre-reading circulated? Where an item warrants it, pre-reading affords attendees an opportunity to prepare and contribute more meaningfully, also evidencing thoroughness of the meeting coordinator.
- Are self-assessment ‘meeting evaluations’ conducted? Means by which teams strive to improve meeting quality and outcomes, such as valuable ‘feedback’ for the chair or meeting leader.
- Are minutes (including agreed resolutions) and ‘action istems’ documented and distributed? This provides continuity and implementation of resolutions when minutes are tabled at subsequent meetings. Of course, such minutes should be reviewed and accepted by the meeting leader to ensure they are an accurate reflection of the group’s discussions. Matters that may have been discussed casually, and even agreed, after the meeting should not be recorded in minutes but held over for the agenda of the next formal meeting.
Staff, clinicians and principals found the exercise beneficial, injecting meaningful structure and achievement-oriented content into meetings, without introducing excessive bureaucracy. We also suggested occasional (not just customary annual) rotation of meeting leaders to spread valuable experience.
While meetings are a useful form of communication, decision making and planning, the other extreme is too many meetings; meetings for the sake of meetings (refer the infamous John Cleese skit, ‘Meetings, meetings, bloody meetings”).
A decision that could be made easily by circulated email might only require a meeting if parties involved cannot reach agreement on a proposal or the matter is sufficiently important to deserve a formal meeting.
About the author: Ms Karen Crouch is managing director of Health Practice Creations Group, a company that assists with practice set ups, administrative, legal and financial management of practices. Contact Karen on 0433 233 478, kcrouch@hpcnsw.com.au or visit www.hpcgroup.com.au.
