Meetings

So you’re in charge of the staff meeting and don’t know where to begin? This is where public speaking concepts and skills can help out.

Running a Meeting

Running a meeting requires many public speaking skills. To run an efficient and productive meeting, you need to be aware of your audience, consider the communicative goals of the meeting (are you conveying information, making decisions, or building a stronger group?), and consider how to structure the information to be delivered. Meetings also require the skills of active listening, paying careful attention to time, and even ensuring that accurate notes are taken.

Below are a few tips for running an effective meeting:

• Stick to your schedule. Create an agenda that lays out everything you plan to cover in the meeting, along with a timeline that allots a certain number of minutes to each item, and email it to people in advance. Once you’re in the meeting, put that agenda up on a screen or whiteboard for others to see. This agenda keeps people focused.

• Start on time, end on time. If you have responsibility for running regular meetings and you have a reputation for being someone who starts and ends promptly, you will be amazed how many of your colleagues will make every effort to attend your meetings. People appreciate it when you understand that their time is valuable. Another note on time: Do not schedule any meeting to last longer than an hour. Sixty minutes is generally the longest time workers can remain truly engaged, and shorter is better.

• Follow up. It’s quite common for people to come away from the same meeting with very different interpretations of what went on. To reduce this risk, email a memo highlighting what was accomplished to all who attended within 24 hours of the meeting. Document the responsibilities given, tasks delegated, and any assigned deadlines. That way, everyone will be on the same page.

Writing an Agenda

An agenda is a document that outlines the goals and activities of a meeting, workshop, or event. The document itself should cover all five W’s: When and where is the meeting, who needs to be there, why are you meeting, what will be discussed (and for how long)? Writing an agenda is somewhat like creating a speech outline – you need to understand the meeting’s purpose and then organize discussion topics in a way that makes sense for the meeting’s purpose, audience, and context.

Some agendas can be quite formal, adhering to a set template of items and procedures. Others are looser, acting as a basic outline for the meeting. Whether the agenda is formal or casual, its goals will be similar, to state the objectives of the meeting, list the topics to be discussed, and outline a schedule for the meeting.

1. Start with the goals of the meeting: what do you want to accomplish overall? Which issues are particularly pressing? Is it a standing meeting (that is, happening every week or month), or was it called for a specific purpose?

2. If appropriate, ask others for input.

3. Make a list of topics or tasks. It can be helpful to phrase these topics as questions, rather than bullet points. So, rather than just “balloons,” you would write: “Balloons: What kind? Who is buying them?”

4. Identify the goal of each task. Typically, these goals will fall into three categories: convey information, get input, or make a decision.

5. Identify how much time each list item will take to cover.

6. Identify who needs to lead or be part of the discussion of each task, and make sure that they know they’re on the agenda.

7. Leave time in each meeting for a wrap-up. The wrap-up should clearly state or reiterate any action items or assigned tasks: What needs to get done before the next meeting? Who needs to do it? How to write an agenda^[1]

Some agendas, especially for large organizations, follow a stricter format, and many organizations use the manual of parliamentary procedure Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised (RONR). Although Robert’s is more detailed, the important thing to note is that it follows the same basic agenda pattern: first it looks backwards with the reports of the committees and the reading of minutes from the last meeting, then it considers the present with “unfinished business,” and then it turns to the future with “new business.”

Taking Minutes

Taking minutes involves skills of summarizing and identifying main points, similar to what you do when you write a brief speaking outline from your fuller speech outline. Although some minutes can be quite formal and detailed, recording the statements of each participant word-for-word, most minutes offer a condensed version of the discussion and decisions made at a meeting.

Generally, minutes include:

• The name of participants
• The agenda of the meeting
• Calendar/due dates
• Actions or tasks
• The main points that were discussed during the meeting
• Decisions made by the participants
• A record of the most important points of this meeting
• Decisions that still need to be made (unresolved questions)
• Documents/images/attached files

A note about taking minutes: if a group secretary or designated administrative support person is not taking minutes at every meeting, minutes are usually taken by a volunteer at the meeting. As a number of commentators have pointed out, there has long been a gender bias in how this task is distributed: generally speaking, women end up taking minutes more often than men.^[2][3][4] Thus, it’s crucial to examine the delegation of tasks like taking minutes on your team to make sure the distribution is equitable and balanced.