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Meetings - what happens at the end?
It all seems straight forward, you chair the meeting, you chat to people, you decide on things to be done, you learn what has happened through the progress reports; then everyone goes about their work. You may even have had a discussion about when to meet again. Sounds OK. But what if things didn’t get done between meetings. You had thought that the people allocated the tasks knew what and when they were supposed to do. But nothing happened or they did the wrong thing?
Closing a meeting is a bit of an art in itself.
Summarise decisions and draw the meeting to a close by listing out the items newly added to the ‘actions list’. Ensure that there is a date and a person responsible for getting that thing done.
Some folks like to have the AOB as the last item on the agenda – is that a good idea? The Any Other Business topic could introduce a whole new or unforeseen item. It could add a lot of time to a debate or decision that you were not prepared for. Try it next time, leave off the AOB – hopefully this will encourage people to actually bring up items to be put on the agenda as soon as they see the agenda circulated before the meeting.
Don’t forget to thank everyone for attending and their input. Follow up later with a ‘thanks’ and a reminder of the action items list so that there is no chance of forgetting the commitments made.
Make sure you circulate the agenda for the next meeting in plenty of time so that people can raise issues to be put on the agenda. On the agenda make sure you set time aside for debate or progress updates - allocate a time budget for each of the topics so that you can control the amount of time spent on each discussion.
Want to learn more about running an effective meeting? One Day Training can help: contact carol@onedaytraining.co.nz
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