Meetings about meetings

It might sound funny but the core managers and I have just had a couple meetings about how to improve meetings. I ordered a book on Amazon and one Core manager read it and did a presentation of the most important aspects. It’s amazing how many things we can improve. There has been criticism in the past that at Argos we waste a lot of time at meetings and that it takes us forever to make decisions. I think the ideas in this book were really practical and we should see some improvement.

So what’s next? We have some new ideas that we are testing out at our core meetings and I guess over the next month or two we will create a standard Argos meeting guide (or something like that). We also want automate the meeting process to some extent and IT is looking into us using some of the meeting modules available through Sharepoint. There are some really cool features there which would make creating an agenda and taking notes and summarizing meetings much easier. All the information and all the documents would be located in one meeting space on the server. This would make searching much and figuring out what was agreed much easier.

I found it very interesting how seriously big companies take meetings. Apparently the CEO of Intel personally did training for new employees on how to have meetings for many years. Anyway, I am completely in favor of these changes. One of the best points in the book for me was that you should always ask yourself, what would happen if we didn’t have a meeting about this topic, if the answer is “nothing” then there is no need to meet. The point being that one of the first things you need to do is minimize meetings by only meeting about really important issues.

Anyway, you’ll hear about this in the months to come.