Creating a meeting culture

Meetings are one of the most important ways for employees to communicate in Fujitsu

by now, everyone has suffered through far too many meetings that took up far too much time and accomplished far too little.

however

What are some key facts?

frequently prefer to exchange information by different means than meetings

9/10Why do most meetings fail?

61,8meetings are attended by an employee per month on average in our sector

Assuming that 1 meeting is 1 hour and noting that 67% of the meetings are considered unproductive for at least part of the attendees

41,4htime wasted per month

92%of employees admit that they are multitasking during meetings

1 lack of purpose

2 missing direction

3 attendees not prepared

4 no topic or not sticking to it

5 hidden agendas

6 wrong attendees

Conduct less meetings

Don’t have a meeting unless it is necessary. Always ask yourself the question whether the same result cannot be obtained via a simple mail, a phone call or a one-to-one discussion. It’s however all about balance, mails have a tendency to become long mail chains so sometimes just a meeting helps.

Decide who to invite

Only people who are actively participating in the meeting should be there. Anyone who is not going to be active or engaged shouldn't be there because you're wasting their time and they can alter the productive mindset of the other attendees.

Have a creative meeting format

Creative formats can range from the location where you hold the meeting to how you actually conduct the meeting. Why not have a brief meeting outside the office building or the coffee corner? If a table for the meeting is just there to hold our coffee cup, why not loose it? Why not have a meeting standing up in the refactory?

Prepare your meetings

Meeting are the same as any other work activity, all attendees should come prepared. The better prepared you are for them, the better the results you can expect. Meetings need an objective so state it clearly and upfront.

Don’t forget the meeting agenda

You must provide a meeting agenda ahead of time that outlines what the attendees need to discuss and the best way of using the allotted time. An agenda shows attendees where they are going, but it's then up to them to figure out how to get there.

Keep time

Everyone has suffered through meetings that went way beyond the scheduled ending time. That could be fine if no one had anything else to do. If you announce the length of the meeting and the various topics on the agenda and then stick to it, fewer attendees will disconnect or keep looking at their watches.

Manage your topics and the overall focus

You must try at any cost to maintain the focus. All too often meetings get off track and stay off track either by people claiming time, changing subjects or doing other stuff like reading or answering mails. So stay on track and close those laptops as otherwise the result is yet another bad meeting that did not achieve the desired goal.

Take minutes, write down actions and assign owners

Someone must take minutes. You want to document decisions, so there is no misunderstanding later. You want to document action items, so that you can hold people accountable and track progress.

Determine the next meeting, if necessary, set the next steps

If the meeting disperses without setting the next date or the next steps, it makes it that much harder to follow-up and hold people accountable. Take advantage of everyone being in one place to get this settled. It’s one less thing you have to do and follow-up later.

Distribute the Meeting Minutes

You should distribute minutes as soon after the meeting as possible, so that attendees can review the key items while they are fresh in their memory as well as review what is expected of them

Our top 10 tips for mastering meetings

Making meetings work for you

Created by Frederik De Breuck, Presales Director, Fujitsu Belgium, 2015

Most popular ways of meeting

1 face to face meetings

2 Microsoft Lync

3 phone conference